Unilife Brand Guidelines: The Prefilled-Syringe Maker That Moved to York, Then Went Bankrupt

An Australian company crosses the Pacific.

Unilife no longer trades. It was a developer and maker of syringes and injection devices for drug companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 12 April 2017 and sold substantially all of its assets that July. Its story ran from Australia to Pennsylvania in less than a decade.

It began as an Australian company. In 2009 it was Unilife Medical Solutions Limited, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, and in April of that year it announced that it was moving its global headquarters from Australia to a leased building at Lewisberry, in York County, Pennsylvania, according to an October 2009 release from the office of Pennsylvania’s governor. The state’s contact with the company went back more than four years, the release said, and state investments had helped bring a project expected to create 241 new jobs by the end of 2012.

Demand from drug companies, the release said, had pushed Unilife to look for a larger building than the leased one. In December 2009 the company announced agreements to build its own global headquarters and production plant on a 38-acre site in York, a 165,000-square-foot building meant to be ready by late 2010. Rather than retrofit an existing warehouse, it chose a custom-built plant, with a 54,000-square-foot office section for headquarters, laboratories and product development, and room to add 100,000 square feet of production space later; with that extension, the company said, the plant could make up to one billion syringes a year, though the extension was not part of the contracts it had signed. The same year, the company said, it had begun pilot production of its prefilled syringe at Lewisberry, working with the drugmaker sanofi-aventis on making it at industrial scale.

The listed parent became Unilife Corporation, a Delaware company. From February 2010 its common stock traded on Nasdaq, while its depositary interests continued to trade on the Australian exchange, the US Securities and Exchange Commission later recorded.

Unifill, Unitract and wearable injectors.

Unilife’s products were syringes meant to be filled and sold by drug companies. Its December 2009 announcement described the Unifill range as ready-to-fill, or prefilled, retractable syringes and said the first stage of the York plant would house automated Unifill assembly lines, together with a line for the Unitract 1mL syringe and space for contract manufacturing.

The SEC later summarised the business simply: Unilife designed and manufactured personal drug delivery systems, such as prefilled syringes and wearable injectors, with production in York and corporate offices at King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

Over time the company moved its focus from syringes to wearable injectors. By 2017 it was developing wearable injectors for drug companies including Amgen, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, and its chief executive described the company’s path as a “transformation to a successful wearable injector-focused business,” Drug Delivery Business News reported.

In 2009 the company described its business as three things: prefilled syringes for the pharmaceutical market, sharps safety devices for the healthcare market, and contract manufacturing of medical devices. The Unitract 1mL syringes were meant for use in healthcare facilities and by people with diabetes, the governor’s office said.

The workforce shrank in its final years. The Inquirer reported that Unilife employed about 278 people in mid-2015, about 160 in 2016, and about 80 when it filed, after layoffs earlier that April.

Design and documentation.

Drug-delivery device makers sell mostly to other companies. Their customers are pharmaceutical and biotech firms that fill a pen, an autoinjector or a prefilled syringe with their own medicine and put their own name on the box, so the device maker’s brand often lives one step back from the patient. That shapes how these companies present themselves: less as consumer brands, more as engineering partners that can be trusted with a drug company’s product.

The pictures follow from that. The typical image is a clean render of a pen or autoinjector on a white or pale ground, often shown from several angles or in a technical cutaway that reveals the spring, the plunger and the syringe inside. Product families are usually named as platforms, with one prefix running across a range, and shown in neutral greys and whites so that a customer can imagine its own colours on the device.

Production is the other recurring theme. Websites and brochures show cleanroom assembly lines, injection-moulding machines, operators in gowns and hairnets, and gloved hands holding glass syringes, cartridges and vials. These images carry the message that the work is precise and controlled, and they sit beside pages on quality systems, regulatory support and human-factors testing with patients.

Much of the industry’s public face is seen at trade shows. Makers book stands at events such as CPHI, the pharmaceutical ingredients and packaging fair, Pharmapack in Paris, and the conferences of the Parenteral Drug Association, where they show new platforms to drug companies. The visual language there is the same: white stands, large product renders, cutaway models and short films of devices being assembled and used.

Bankruptcy, a sale and an SEC order.

The end came quickly. In March 2016 Unilife announced that its founder had stepped down as chief executive and resigned as chairman. On 12 April 2017 Unilife and its US subsidiaries filed voluntary Chapter 11 petitions in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, with debtor-in-possession financing offered by the New York investment firm OrbiMed Advisors, the Inquirer reported; the company said then that it would seek either to restructure its balance sheet or to sell the business as a going concern. Its chief executive said its capital structure had been “put in place to support our business model as a diffuse drug delivery system company,” before the focus narrowed to wearable injectors. Nasdaq said its stock would be delisted from 8 May 2017. After an auction on 17 July 2017, the court approved the sale of substantially all of Unilife’s assets on 21 July 2017, according to the SEC.

In December 2017 the SEC issued a settled order against the company’s founder and former chief executive. Without admitting or denying them, he accepted findings that he had signed an annual report for the year to June 2014 that wrongly described a director as independent, had arranged improper advances and loans, and had been late in disclosing that he had pledged Unilife shares as collateral. The order barred him for five years from serving as an officer or director of a company with SEC-registered securities.

For a design guide, Unilife shows a device brand built around named syringe platforms that did not outlast the company behind them. Compare BD, a long-established syringe maker, and West Pharmaceutical, another maker of injection components for drug companies. For this guide we use a slate blue and a steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Unilife’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.