Gautam Goel and Kanupriya Goel are a husband-and-wife doctor/designer team who were inspired to try to tackle the problem of expiring medicines after helping their grandparents clean out their medicine cabinets. "In their frail states, with such limited vision and dexterity, they found it extremely challenging to read the expiration dates printed in these tiny five-point fonts on their medicine strips." And even if they could read the expiration dates, they found it difficult to interpret medical information on a package that was written in English, a language that was not their native tongue.
Kanupriya Goel received the Red Dot award for this conceptThe Goels realized this was a problem that was a lot bigger than their grandparents’ bathrooms. "Outside of the West, there is little awareness to the concept of a medicine becoming 'expired,'" say the Goels. "We’re not even just talking about the market shelf-life of a medicine strip here. It’s alarming how little the average person understands how quickly a medicine becomes dangerous for consumption."
The team’s design is informed by research of focused groups in India, like the elderly population, construction workers, slum dwellers, and kids between age 6-12. They realized that in many cases people were not aware of the concept of expiration of medicines. While in some cases the awareness of such a concept was limited, in many others the inability to find or read it on the packaging posed additional problems. The team found that in India medicinal strips had the expiration information stamped in one corner. In the event that these strips were sold as a single dose, the expiration information would be missing. In some cases it was observed the retailers sold expired medicines cheaper to earn a profit. The team sought out wanted a solution that could solve the problem, and raise awareness at all levels.
The Goels’ solution is very simple. Instead of simply printing the expiration date on a blister pack of medicine, which can be hard to read or which can wear off, why not coat the foil with a specially treated paper that changes color as it ages? That way, you could have medical packaging that starts out, say, blue, but turns red when it expires, or gets crossed out with a big "X." If you wanted to be even more dramatic, you could design packaging where the international grimoire of death and danger, the skull and crossbones, gradually appears when a medicine becomes unsafe for consumption.
The technology to create this kind of packaging isn’t out of reach: We’ve already seen ID badges and milk cartons that change color as they expire. Self-expiring medicine packaging seems like a natural fit. As with so many things in the world of big pharma, though, the obstacles in the way of realizing the Goels’ clever design don’t have anything to do with the tech, and definitely not the soundness of the idea.
"The truth is, this kind of packaging might never become a reality unless pharmaceutical companies can profitably pass off the additional cost of the packaging, however miniscule, to the patient," the Goels say. "An FDA mandate could be critical in getting this on shelves."
There could also be regulatory and legal challenges involved that could nix this idea in the bud. "The pharma world is über regulated, and liability lawyers hover around every corner," says Dermot Gildea, an expert on pharmaceutical regulation based in Dublin, Ireland. "In addition, the process to register a change in outer packaging, like the printed packs that a pharmacy might hand to a patient, is more stringently regulated than one might think." Even so, Gildea thinks the Goels might be onto something here. "If the inner pack’s appearance when the medicine is in date is similar to the current form, and the appearance only changes when the medicine expires, then I think this idea could be a winner."
Whether or not the Goels’ concept can clear regulatory, legal, and self-serving pharma industry hurdles is unknown. What is sure, though, is that we all could live in a world where no one has to guess whether a medicine is safe to take.
