New printer for AstraZeneca vaccine syringe packaging

A pos­i­tive and long-await­ed boost has come from the launch of Oxford-AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vac­cine in the fight against the glob­al pan­dem­ic. Gov­ern­ments around the world are cur­rent­ly mak­ing great efforts to vac­ci­nate their pop­u­la­tions as quick­ly as pos­si­ble and, through the immu­ni­ty thus achieved, to slow the fur­ther spread of the virus.
The vac­cine, devel­oped in the UK by Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty and bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny AstraZeneca, is already being deliv­ered in main­land Europe. In Bec­ton Dick­in­son, the UK gov­ern­ment has select­ed a world leader in med­ical tech­nol­o­gy to sup­ply a large order of syringes and hypo­der­mic nee­dles called Flu+ to admin­is­ter the vaccine.
These will be man­u­fac­tured by Bec­ton Dick­in­son at its pro­duc­tion site in Fra­ga, in the Span­ish province of Huesca.In Spain, Bec­ton Dick­in­son is already work­ing with Domi­no Amjet Ibéri­ca on sev­er­al print­ing and cod­ing projects. One of these uses the high-speed inkjet print­ing tech­nol­o­gy of the Domi­no K600i to dig­i­tal­ly print unique codes on the paper out­er pack­ag­ing of the hypo­der­mic nee­dles and syringes used for the COVID-19 vaccine.
The deci­sion to inte­grate the dig­i­tal print­er with these pack­ag­ing machines was a very ambi­tious step. They need­ed a solu­tion to the print­ing prob­lems they had encoun­tered with oth­er sys­tem solu­tions: slow and inef­fi­cient prod­uct changeovers between mul­ti­ple stock keep­ing units (SKUs), too many inter­rup­tions and too long down­times for con­sum­ables replace­ment, recur­ring print­ing errors, and insuf­fi­cient print­ing speed.
At Fra­ga, syringe and nee­dle pack­ag­ing machines oper­ate at high line speeds. Only the most reli­able and fastest print­ing sys­tems can meet these high pro­duc­tion requirements.

“We are very pleased that Bec­ton Dick­in­son has cho­sen to inte­grate the Domi­no K600i dig­i­tal inkjet print­er into its pro­duc­tion line. The print­er has met Bec­ton Dick­in­son’s high print qual­i­ty require­ments. With it, the com­pa­ny has been able — with­out com­pro­mis­ing on print speed — to sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce waste due to incor­rect prints and sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce print­ing costs.”
— Manuel Hernán­dez, Busi­ness Man­ag­er of Domi­no Dig­i­tal Print­ing Solutions