The Mayo Clinic Proceedings article “Drug Shortages: A Complex Health Care Crisis” finds that in 2009 the number of drug shortages began to increase past what the article calls a “crisis level.” The American System of Healthcare Pharmacists (ASHP) now tracks drug shortages with an online dashboard, enabling pharmacists to check when drugs will be available or report their own shortages. The ASHP also has a fantastic infographic showing how drug shortages affect patients. A drug shortage can require a surgical delay, limit a patient’s treatment options, or drastically alter medical costs for a patient. These shortages can also require pharmacists to allocate which patients will receive a drug that is in short supply, place restrictions on the drug, or work to find alternative treatment methods.
A 2019 Vizient study estimates that the annual cost of drug shortages in the U.S. is $359 million, based on data from 6,000 hospitals. The National Center for Biotechnology Information looked for the root causes of drug shortages in its study “The Drug Shortage Crisis in the United States: Causes, Impact, and Management Strategies,” and while the main cause was manufacturing problems at 23 percent, a whopping 55 percent of cases in the study were attributed to the slightly unsettling unknown factors.
Dr. Yue “Sophie” Wang from Clemson University is aware of the issues with drug shortages and is working to help mitigate the issue with her favorite problem-solving tool: robots. Wang said, “Pharmaceutical collaborative robots is a new and quickly growing research area. By combining our expertise with unique applications in pharmaceutical manufacturing, we hope to benefit both patients and the industry through increased efficiency in syringe manufacturing.”
Partnering with Nephron Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Wang and her team from Clemson are trying to answer a question—If manufacturing is really the biggest root cause in the drug shortage game, what can be done to optimize the manufacturing process? The current state at the Nephron 503B outsourcing facility has technicians prefilling syringes. The syringe filling process requires specialized technicians, clean rooms and laminar air flow hoods. Five employees per day per air flow hood are working to meet the demand for these syringes. This is a job that robots could perform with mechanical precision, giving the technicians the opportunity to take other skilled positions within Nephron.
Together Nephron and Clemson are building a task-specific clean room on the Clemson campus, and Lou Kennedy from Nephron envisions the possibility of this benchtop robotics system in use across the country. Using robotics for this application makes sense for the benefits it provides in quality control, throughput and cost savings. As a whole, robotics partnerships are expected to reach $119.46 million in 2021, according to one study. One interesting point made in the study is that a lack of skilled personnel in robotics automation might restrict the growth of the pharmacy robotics industry.
When you think about syringe pre-filling as a highly repetitive, highly skilled task with demand that could easily gobble up two to three times the current output of a company like Nephron, the shift to robotics seems like the perfect solution.
Fifteen years ago, many of my industrial engineering colleagues started working with hospitals and doctors’ offices to map the flow of patients, information and supplies. Some optimizations were found in terms of processes and procedures, resulting in optimizations of services and what we hope is a better experience for the patient. This partnership between Clemson and Nephron feels like a continuation of that partnership between engineering and health care, and leveraging the power of robotics to create better patient outcomes is a great goal to work toward.