Marcelo Cruz of Tjoapack discusses his company’s role in the contract packaging space.

24/7 Biopharma caught up with Marcelo Cruz, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Tjoapack, a contract packaging organisation, at CPHI Milan. Tjoapack has packaging facilities in both the United States and the Netherlands.

Our conversation opened with a discussion on flexibility, which every contract organisation professes but few acutely explain. According to Cruz, Tjoapack’s approach is built on a discussion-oriented model where, if needed, bespoke solutions can be designed via a collaborative process.

“The flexibility in our case is that we try to find solutions together with clients,” said Cruz. “For instance, we just talked to a client a few minutes ago that we’re going to have a brainstorming session between their SMEs. We’re going to lock ourselves in the room and go through the whole supply chain process to try to find an effective solution for [the] issue that they are having. Now it’s a very complex project, it’s a pre-filled syringe that needs sterilisation. It needs to have these constraints created for different markets. So it’s something that not many people can do, and we can help them in that.”

In this vein, Cruz also believes that Tjoapack benefits from being a small-to-medium sized company. Larger companies, by nature of their scale, have less ability to modify their processes on a customer-by-customer basis, which can lead to complications when dealing with more specialised products. For Tjoapack, this provides them a niche that they can operate in, while still allowing for scale and growth through its complementary offerings in the oral solid dosage business.

“What helps us is the fact that we have different services that we offer. At Tjoapack Netherlands, we have 20 production lines. 14 of those lines are oral solids, [and] oral solids is about volume,” said Cruz. “So that gives the base for the company to invest on injectables: oral solids bring the large volumes from generic pharma, for instance, and the injectables part is where we deal with specialty pharma and small volumes. It’s complementary, I think the services complement each other and help us to be able to offer this customised service to our clients as well.”

In terms of ongoing trends, Cruz felt that the significant growth in injectables was having a discrete impact on contract packaging organisations like Tjoapack. While he was quick to point out that this would not replace oral solids, due to their cost-effectiveness, the increasing affordability of injectors was providing new opportunities to drug manufacturers and patients alike.

“The cost of the injectors is going down from the, let’s say, large pharmaceuticals, the mainstream to small pharma,” said Cruz. “It becomes more democratising…everybody has access to these kinds of drugs, which before were too expensive for the mainstream market. So this, for me, is something that is changing.”