Safeguarding Biologies-Blending Engineering Ingenuity and Managerial Excellence

ABSTRACT

Many best practices and lessons learned have emerged in recent years as pharma/life sciences companies, along with their third-party logistics partners and vendors that supply specialized packaging and monitoring solutions, have all weathered the COVID-19 pandemic together and continued to support ongoing growth in the pipeline of therapeutic products that must be continuously maintained at refrigerated, frozen, or ultra-frozen temperatures. Cold chain planning and execution "... continues to be impacted by not only the pandemic but by other factors, such as air cargo capacity being down, instability related to inflation, the Russia/Ukraine conflict, and more, but despite it all, you still have patients depending on what you're delivering," notes Rob Coyle, senior vice president, healthcare strategy, Kuehne+Nagel. "With careful planning, we're often able to replace active shippers with passive units by leveraging existing infrastructure, ongoing advances in insulation materials, phase-change materials (PCM), and container designs, using advanced GPS and other monitoring devices to ensure continuous access to real-time location, temperature, and other data," adds Scott Ohanesian, senior vice president, commercial operations, QuickStat, a Kuehne+Nagel company. Technology advances "The Holy Grail for the pharma cold chain is 'how do I get perfect service at a more economical price?'" says Dan Gagnon, vice president of global strategy for UPS Healthcare.