Clariant Healthcare Packaging to Partner with FreeThink to Offer Predictive Modeling for the Stability of Drugs

Muttenz, November 30, 2015 – Clariant, a world leader in specialty chemicals, announced that its Healthcare Packaging business unit has entered into a joint promotion agreement with FreeThink Technologies Inc. to support pharmaceutical and nutraceutical customers with predictive calculation and modeling.

Clariant manufactures a full range of protective packaging technologies and pharmaceutical desiccants that extend the shelf life of sensitive drugs while maintaining their stability. Clariant will collaborate with FreeThink Technologies, utilizing the company’s analytical services and its ASAPprime® software tool to model the influence of climatic conditions on packaged drug degradation over time. Modeling data then can be used to rapidly, accurately and confidently determine drug substance and drug product shelf-life.

“Bringing together Clariant’s expertise in the area of protective packaging and desiccants, and FreeThink’s renowned modeling methodologies, we can offer the pharmaceutical market the most robust service for predictive calculations to optimize protection of drugs,” said Mark Florez, Product Manager, Clariant Healthcare Packaging.

Dr. Kenneth Waterman, a veteran of the pharmaceutical industry specializing in drug stability, founded FreeThink Technologies, Inc. in 2011. Its cutting-edge technologies focus on accelerated shelf-life and stability determinations for pharmaceuticals, consumer products, nutraceuticals and medical devices. FreeThink maintains laboratories in Groton, CT where it conducts studies for international client companies and develops new pharmaceutical-oriented technologies.

“We are excited about our partnership with Clariant,” said Dr. Waterman, “and we are looking forward to combining our relevant competencies to support pharmaceutical customers’ evaluation of packaging technologies for sensitive molecules.”

Even with predictive modeling, drug package configurations still need to undergo stability testing, but the process can be streamlined by predicting which protective package system is most likely to provide the required protection. It is also important to simulate and predict the impact of any proposed changes to existing packaging configurations.

The partnership with FreeThink will give Clariant additional resources to draw on as it continues to work directly with customers, calculating the environmental conditions inside drug packaging over time, and predicting the protection time which generally expires when a critical relative humidity level is reached.

Clariant Healthcare Packaging is dedicated to enhancing and protecting healthcare products by providing a full portfolio of controlled atmosphere packaging solutions that protect products from degradation and help maintain stability and integrity throughout shelf life. With a global production network and innovative product development, its products include desiccants, oxygen scavengers, active container-closure systems and multilayer barrier packaging. www.clariant.com/healthpack