New Pharma Packaging Center

Mer­ck, a sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, inau­gu­rat­ed today a new pack­ag­ing cen­ter at its head­quar­ters in Darm­stadt, Ger­many. The open­ing cer­e­mo­ny was attend­ed by Ste­fan Oschmann, Chair­man of the Exec­u­tive Board and CEO of Mer­ck, as well as Ste­fan Grüt­tner, Min­is­ter of Social Affairs and Inte­gra­tion for the Ger­man Fed­er­al State of Hesse, and Jochen Partsch, May­or of the City of Darmstadt.
“Darm­stadt is our prime hub for the man­u­fac­tur­ing of med­i­cines and it plays a key role in our plans for future growth. This lat­est invest­ment in a new state-of-the-art pack­ag­ing cen­ter reflects our com­mit­ment to our head­quar­ters and is a com­pelling exam­ple of how we use the lat­est tech­no­log­i­cal advances to always bet­ter serve our patients,” said Ste­fan Oschmann.
The new 15,000 square meters facil­i­ty will be ded­i­cat­ed to the pack­ag­ing and ship­ping of Merck’s cur­rent port­fo­lio of phar­ma med­i­cines in more than 90 coun­tries and help meet increas­ing patient needs for flag­ship med­i­cines Glu­cophage, Con­cor and Euthy­rox in the areas of dia­betes, car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases and thy­roid dis­or­ders respec­tive­ly. It will also pro­vide capac­i­ty for poten­tial future phar­ma prod­ucts cur­rent­ly in clin­i­cal devel­op­ment such as evo­bru­ti­nib in the area of neu­rol­o­gy-immunol­o­gy or tepo­tinib in the area of oncology.
With its eight ful­ly auto­mat­ed pack­ag­ing lines and robo­t­ized logis­tics, the new pack­ag­ing cen­ter will have the capac­i­ty to process more than 210 mil­lion box­es of med­i­cines every year. It is designed to incor­po­rate a broad range of new tech­nolo­gies such as the track­ing & trac­ing of med­i­cines to pre­vent coun­ter­feit, or smart pack­ag­ing to ensure more flex­i­bil­i­ty to adapt the pro­duc­tion of med­i­cines to patient demand. The new pack­ag­ing cen­ter is also designed to com­ply with the high­est inter­na­tion­al stan­dards in terms of qual­i­ty, envi­ron­ment, health and safety.