New non-stick technology opens up possibilities in various industries

A young US-headquartered company has devised technology that is based on the idea of creating a non-stick surface by eliminating friction. In this way, issues varying from packaging residues to occluded catheters can be addressed, solving problems and saving costs in healthcare and other industries around the world.

Product residues stuck in the packaging are a huge source of waste that often goes unrecognised.

More than 50 billion packages are sold every year containing viscous products, leaving enough of the contents behind in these packages to fill up 110,000 semi-trucks.

This can be especially costly in the case of expensive pharmaceutical products.

A US-based start-up called LiquiGlide is now commercialising technology to address this problem. Founded by MIT researchers Kripa Varanasi and Dave Smith, LiquiGlide was spun out of MIT in 2012.

The technology is based on the idea of eliminating friction, enabling thick, slow-moving liquids to flow easily, resulting in virtually every last drop of the product exiting the package. This is achieved quite simply through the use of coating layers.

As Chief Business Officer of LiquiGlide Dan Rippy, explained, it’s a question of mechanics. Surfaces vary widely by type, he said, but key to LiquiGlide's coatings is a bi-layered approach that creates one layer that becomes solid and textured with microscopic ridges and gaps, and a second liquid layer that fills up these gaps, said Rippy. A durable slippery coating is created through the application of the liquid layer to which the contents of the packaging will not stick. In other words, LiquiGlide fundamentally changes how liquids and solids interact.

The surface continues to be slippery because the liquid coating is held in place between the textures. The coatings can be custom designed to adhere to a variety of surface materials and can be designed to be edible or to withstand harsh industrial environments. “The ingredients in LiquiGlide's coatings are FDA approved pharmaceutical grade materials,” said Rippy.

The technology, he added, is friction-reducing, adhesion-preventing, safe, and environmentally friendly and can therefore be used to enhance the performance of a wide range of medical products.

“Looking at just one example: catheters and catheter-related complications and we can think about occlusion, we can think about clotting, and we can think about bio-film buildup associated with catheters.  These challenges create tremendous expense for health care systems around the world. Not only do issues like this with catheters mean first and foremost  that it has to come out and be replaced with a new one, which is obviously not advantageous to the patient, having to do so also consumes critical time within a hospital,” he explained.

“The ability to reduce occlusion of catheters has the potential to provide significant health and economic benefit. And, importantly, the patient is not being subjected to higher risk of infection  It’s just one example of where catheter-related complications are well-known and well-documented. And these are extremely high: in the billions of dollars a year.”

Other applications could include vascular access and implantable devices; surgical products; medical device instrumentation and processing; biomedical packaging; and syringes, containers, and delivery systems for biologics, pharmaceutical therapeutics, and vaccines.

“In addition, it can help reduce yield loss of high value medicines in the manufacturing and production process,” Rippy noted.    

He said that in the case of certain high-value viscous-type drug products, companies need to overfill a container by 10 to 15%, as a residue will always stay behind. The benefit for patients is ‘huge’ if the amount of a drug that comes out of a given container is in line with the product’s label and dosing and things of that nature, he added.   

“So, there’s a lot of potential for our technology to achieve what we will call a triple aim, which is: to reduce cost; improve patient care; and to improve outcomes in the biomedical domain.”

Approved for use

In June, LiquiGlide, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had accepted a Device Master File (MAF) from LiquiGlide's biomedical division for the novel, patented coating platform.

"This MAF is an exciting accomplishment for LiquiGlide," said Dan Rippy, Executive Vice President and General Manager of LiquiGlide Biomedical. "Our submission provides rigorous testing and analytical quality and makes it easier for our partner companies to integrate our technology into their workflows and obtain approval for new medical products incorporating our technology. When using our coating in their device, they can reference our device masterfiling with the FDA when seeking approval of their product.”

The MAF includes proprietary information regarding LiquiGlide's coating formulation and processes that will help facilitate regulatory review of company partners' product submissions, and LiquiGlide is able to provide letters of authorization to partner companies.   

“So, it’s not so much that we obtain approval as we make available a lot of information about our product and platform and technology can be referenced by others. It can help expedite the review process, if you will. We expect this MAF to be the first of many submissions that LiquiGlide Biomedical makes to the FDA."

The company will seek to do something similar in the EU, as well.

Included in the MAF submission are a number of important performance parameters, among which measurements of lubricity, biocompatibility, and occlusion reduction as well as animal testing demonstrating patency, safety, and antithrombogenicity.

In other words, said Rippy, we have found that the coating can prevent, say, blood from clotting or occluding in a tube, so, it can reduce thrombosis. “We have actually shown a 99% reduction in thrombosis in a lab top or bench top belt loop model of blood flow. Plus, it can reduce the build-up of biofilm, which is an issue with a number of medical devices. We are exploring a number of opportunities for those properties of the coatings.”

Towards zero waste

Aside from the very considerable benefits in the medical device area, there are sustainability gains as well. “Our team is on a mission to change the paradigm across industries to usher in sustainable products and processes as well as improve patient outcomes,” said LiquiGlide co-founder Kripa Varanasi.

In conventional liquids packaging, whether food or cosmetics, high-value drugs or biologics, waste has always been an unavoidable evil. LiquiGlide’s technology has the potential to eliminate waste and residues, thus also enhancing the recyclability of containers to which the coating has been applied. In cases where the contents of a container may not be completely recyclable or even potentially environmentally harmful, the fact that the coating can achieve 100% evacuation of the material has the potential to enable the recyclability of a container.

Recycling is almost impossible when product residue is left behind in packaging. In some cases, a significant amount of water is needed to clean the packages. But the reality is that many products we believe we are recycling end up in the landfill, said Varanasi.

The first commercial application in the market for the technology has actually been packaging – a toothpaste tube, to be precise. As  one of the first to apply the technology in a consumer product, Colgate launched its toothpaste brand Elixir in a transparent PET tube, enabling a fully recyclable package that eliminates product waste. The product earned the Ameristar awards for both "Best of Show" and "Design Excellence" from the Institute of Packaging Professionals.

“The Colgate product is 100% recyclable, both because it is made from PET and because you can get 100% of the contents out of the container,” said Rippy. “Our coating ingredients, being plant-based, are completely biodegradable and to the extent that the container material itself is, is fully recyclable in the container recycling stream.”

The Colgate toothpaste tube has since been followed by LiquiGlide’s launch of a new packaging solution for the health and beauty industry. Designed by Yves Béhar and his US-based firm, fuseproject, the new containers are to be sold under the EveryDrop brand name.

According to Béhar, LiquiGlide's breakthrough technology has the power to scale and make a significant difference from a sustainability standpoint. "When combined with design innovation, the LiquiGlide technology is an opportunity to completely transform primary packaging and to finally bring about a cyclical system of "zero waste"—from product design to disposal—to drive responsible consumption." And by eliminating material waste, the packages further reduce the carbon footprint associated with consumer-packaged goods.

Aside from packaging, the technology has also been implemented by the Swiss Mibelle Group, to eliminate manufacturing waste. The CleanTanX technology developed by LiquiGlide has enabled the Group to reduce the yield loss in its toothpaste manufacturing tanks up to 99%, and resulted in insignificant savings in wash water, energy and labour. Now, that partnership is expanding to other product lines.

Cost

One of the main hurdles to the adoption of new technologies is cost. Is that the case here is well?According to Rippy, the cost of the technology is relatively low. “As a company, we’ve spent a lot of time, effort, energy and money in developing IP around these coatings. But the coatings themselves, the material itself is not expensive. So, we are potentially able to deploy coatings in a variety of different areas really without imposing much- if any – of a cost burden on a given product, container, device – whatever.”

Thinking about the tremendous cost-benefit of being able to get an extra 10-15% of, say, highly viscous medicines or biologics out of a container simply by using our coating, the cost savings there are very significant, he added.

“All in all, it’s not that complicated at the end of the day, particularly for companies who are manufacturers.”