Combination Product Industry News & Guidance
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Revolutionizing Drug Packaging | with Matt Wills
Episode 3 of the Navigating the Combination podcast has dropped!
In this episode, Jonathan Amaya-Hodges and Parth Kothari sit down with Matt Wills, Director of Process Development and Engineering at SiO2 Materials Science, to dig into a part of combination products that rarely gets the attention it deserves: the container itself. Matt has spent his career at the intersection of material science and primary packaging, and he makes the case that as biologics and gene therapies get more sensitive, the container stops being a passive vessel and becomes an active part of the drug product system. The conversation moves from the tradeoffs between glass, plastic, and hybrid materials, to why teams underestimate how many distinct components make up a single syringe, to the ongoing debate over silicone oil, and finally to what it takes to build a common drug-contact surface across an entire manufacturing chain. Matt closes with a piece of advice for anyone earlier in their career: the real value isn’t in mastering one component in isolation — it’s in understanding the interfaces between them.
Key takeaways:
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As formulations get more sensitive, the drug contact surface — not just the bulk material — becomes the critical variable, with real implications for regulatory strategy and risk ownership
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Glass and plastic each carry their own tradeoffs (delamination risk vs. oxygen barrier performance), which is why hybrid and coated approaches are gaining ground
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One of the biggest misconceptions in the industry: treating a syringe or device as a single component, when barrel, plunger, and needle each interact with a drug differently
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A system performs at the level of its weakest component — an airtight rigid needle shield doesn’t matter if another part of the system isn’t gas-tight, and most syringe components are optimized independently by different manufacturers
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Building a common drug-contact surface across API storage, tubing, and final container doesn’t eliminate validation, but it can eliminate much of the unknown — shifting the regulatory argument from re-proving drug interaction to proving material equivalence, and opening the door to bridging studies instead of full real-time stability aging
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Career advice from a decade-plus in the space: the biggest gaps show up not within components, but in the interfaces between them, where individually-optimized parts have to work as a system