Gerresheimer AG, Stevanato Group Develop RTU Vial Platform

Gerresheimer AG, who offers healthcare, beauty, and drug delivery systems for pharma, biotech and cosmetics, and Stevanato Group S.p.A., a provider of drug containment, drug delivery, and diagnostic solutions to the pharma, biotech, and life sciences industries, have jointly developed a high-end Ready-to-Use (RTU) solution platform with an initial focus on vials. It is based on Stevanato Group's market-leading “EZ-fill” technology and according to the parties, the collaboration is projected to help customers gain efficiencies, improve the quality standard, increase speed to market, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and help mitigate supply chain risk.

The partnership intends to make RTU vials a standard—available to a wide number of pharma companies globally—by offering premium quality solutions to patients and reducing complexity for pharma operations. The new solution will be available to other players in the market to standardize fill-finish operations, from early phase drug development to commercialization.

This aforementioned platform is expected to share the same secondary packaging, production process, and sterilization method, ensuring consistent available capacity and a reliable double sourcing to the pharma industry. The new jointly developed vial platform and trademark will be presented in detail to the market at the CPhI Worldwide Frankfurt this coming November.

"The new developed RTU platform stands out in terms of quality, TCO, and sustainability, and takes the use of RTU solutions like vials and, in the future, cartridges to a new level," comments Lukas Burkhardt, PhD, member of the management board of Gerresheimer AG. "Due to the strong reduction of the particle load, the quality is significantly increased. Our new innovative solution will convince the market to significantly accelerate the conversion from bulk to RTU vials."