Innovating our Medicines.

Based from the Philippine Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PPMA), there are more or less 50 pharmaceutical companies is the country today. Most of them are widely known in the country thru the radio and television ads but some might still be foreign to the many.

With this number of pharma companies, how are we consumers ensured of safe and effective drugs or medicine..??

I believe it would be good for our government to look into this and check the standards on how our medicines/drugs are being packaged. Pharmaceutical packaging standards should initially demand standards for the following:

- safety of consumers,
- preservation,
- efficiency, and
- hygiene

In other countries, there is a growing increase of demand for innovative packaging in the retail sector for pharmaceuticals. Not only do they take the four items mentioned above into consideration, they also look into other factors such as bioavailability, efficiency of dosage, fast and efficient solubility of compounds, and the like.

If you notice, some drugs sold in other countries today are being repacked from the usual tablets to being a capulette, from the usual capsule to being a liqui-gel (ex. Advil), from the usual bad-drug tasting tablets to being sugar-coated tablets (ex. Tylenol). These are just some living proofs of innovative pharmaceutical packaging .

Notice that other than remodeling the design and texture of how these drugs are packaged, pharmaceutical packaging also adds value to the product by making the product more convenient and attractive to the users.

Right now, I have only seen pharmaceutical packaging and innovation on one of our most selling export products, the virgin coconut oil where in the dosage transformed from a syrup-like liquid into a liqui-gel.