Pharmaceutical packaging is no longer just about containment and compliance—it’s about enabling patients, streamlining manufacturing, and accelerating time to market. In this Q&A, Mark Foster, General Manager of Oliver Design, offers a behind-the-scenes look at how his team is helping biotech companies bring complex therapies to patients through smart, scalable, patient-centered packaging. From concept sketches to cold chain-ready prototypes, Oliver Design is a strategic partner in a high-stakes space where usability, safety, and speed all matter.

Foster discusses how Oliver Design approaches the tricky balance between design intent, human factors, and manufacturability. He also highlights the company’s commitment to sustainability and its ability to move fast without compromising on quality. Whether it’s designing for patients with neurological conditions or building in features that improve self-administration, Oliver Design’s work reflects a deeper understanding of the therapy lifecycle—and the people who depend on it.

Contract Pharma: For readers who may not be familiar, can you give us a high-level overview of Oliver Design—its mission, core offerings, and how it supports pharmaceutical and healthcare innovators?

Mark Foster: Oliver Design provides packaging design and prototype services for biotechnology applications. From concept drawings to fully engineered part designs and production representative sample sets, Oliver Design supports a broad array of packaging formats. Oliver Design helps to enable speed to market for companies on the forefront of bringing life-changing therapies to patients.

Pictured above are examples of Oliver Design’s biopharma packaging kits.

CP: What does “design for manufacture” mean in the context of pharmaceutical packaging and drug delivery devices, and why is it so important?

Mark: Design for manufacture is designing with the manufacturing process in mind. This ensures that your design isn’t just a design but that it can be produced by standard, scalable manufacturing processes. You’ll also find design for manufacture typically means designing for efficiency when it comes to time and money.

CP: How does Oliver Design help customers strike the right balance between design intent, patient needs, and manufacturability?

Mark: This is not an easy balance to strike, it takes experience and working with therapies and devices every day. Especially since streamlined production and patient usability often work at odds with each other. From our perspective, meeting (or exceeding) the patient usability requirements must be the primary criteria to solve for, without over-engineering the solution. Many patients are at different stages in their prognosis; therefore, you need to first determine priority to these inputs and then look at what can actually be done. Developing an efficient packaging solution that does not meet human factors assessments is not an acceptable path. Quite often, developing a packaging solution that meets formative human factors assessments and then refining that solution, as needed, to address production efficiency requirements while maintaining success during the summative human factors assessment is the best path forward.

CP: What roles do patient insights and user feedback play in your design process, and how do you integrate that feedback into final solutions?

Mark: This is challenging, yet one of the more interesting aspects of healthcare packaging design. For some therapies the packaging solution can be driven by standard design criteria and efficiencies. But in many cases, we must also consider patient context. This is especially true with therapies that end up in the hands of patients, particularly those with conditions that impact their day-to-day. An example would be patients that have neurological conditions, such as bipolar disorders. How these patients interpret instructions must be considered.

Oliver Design works closely with the biopharma customer, human factors consultants, and even behavioral specialists when needed to better understand patient insights so we can develop the optimal packaging solution. Feedback from these key groups is then integrated into the packaging. If we use bipolar disorders as the example, design features are intended to 1) summarize all required steps and 2) slow down the patient’s access to the combination device. This is done by introducing panel features in the packaging that provided clear, concise illustration or instruction, to enable the proper administration.  

CP: How do you collaborate with your customers—from early-stage concepts to late-stage commercialization?

Mark: The entire process is extremely collaborative, and we meet customers where they are in the process. In some cases that means starting at the very beginning with concept development and with other customers, that means refining a design they already have. In all cases we start with a discovery session to determine key inputs, criteria, deadlines, requirements, and any challenges. It is important that we are also able to keep pace with our customers’ project timeframe. Being 100% focused on developing packaging solutions for biotech market applications has enabled us to be very capable of moving quickly when needed by the customer.

CP: Sustainability is an increasing concern in the pharmaceutical space. How does Oliver Design incorporate environmental responsibility into its design-for-manufacture approach?

Mark: Oliver Design really helps companies design out the waste before it is created. There is a fine line between an innovative and cool packaging concept and an over designed one. Over designed packaging tends to be less environmentally friendly. Therefore, when we design for our clients, we ensure that we are not only designing for manufacturability but that we are also designing in a way that eliminates excess waste. For therapies that require cold chain distribution, even small reductions in packaging can translate into very significant cost savings and carbon footprint reductions. Being mindful of materials and the associated waste stream variances is also a consideration.

CP: In your experience, what are some of the most common pitfalls companies encounter when overlooking design early in development—and how can they be avoided?

Mark: Not thinking about packaging design early in the process can cause a lot of pitfalls because packaging can really help to ensure that a drug or therapy is administered appropriately and meets shelf-life requirements. Poorly designed packaging can result in user errors and poor efficacy. When the appropriate time is built in for packaging you can better test design options to ensure you are best serving your end user. The best behavioral specialists will say “I don’t know” when asked about how patients with specific challenges will interpret instructions, and human factor studies yield surprising outcomes more often than not. Good packaging can set your brand apart from a competitor.

CP: What distinguishes Oliver Design from other design partners in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector?

Mark: We are 100% focused on the biotechnology space. This market warrants the dedication and expertise developed with years of experience. We also maintain a strong understanding of manufacturing processes, which is imperative to ensure that the final packaging solution can be executed at the scale required for the therapy. Moreover, we are fast. Our focus as an engineering firm has made us capable of keeping pace with our customers.

CP: Looking ahead, what trends in packaging, delivery devices or patient engagement do you think will shape the future of pharma design?

Mark: We have already discussed sustainability which will continue to grow as a part of the design criteria for healthcare packaging. From our perspective, we also see a greater refinement of the final packaging solution as a growing trend. What I mean by this is packaging that better enables the self-administration of a therapy. Increasingly we are seeing therapies that have varied drug administration schedules—proper packaging can help to improve efficacy when used to further ensure the patient follows directions. I really believe packaging will continue to play an increasing role in the proper administration of therapies.

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