Supply chain & logistics
Those billions of vials, after all, didn’t simply appear by the rolled-up sleeves of eager punters. Rather, they have to be painstakingly packaged and transported, protected from bumpy roads and shielded from extreme weather. And though temperature-controlled packaging has been a vital part of the pharma supply chain for years, it’s equally clear the pandemic and its consequences have sped development up. That’s particularly true when it comes to so-called hybrid container solutions. Rather than exclusively focusing on keeping drugs cool – often via expensive and unsustainable batteries – these hybrid systems instead seamlessly react to external temperatures. Apart from keeping medications secure whatever the climate throws at them, these platforms are also far greener than traditional containers. At their best, they could drastically cut human error from the supply chain equation, boosting efficiency, and cutting costs. Not that the path forward is necessarily straightforward. From staffing to costs, there are plenty of challenges for insiders to ponder. All the same, it’s clear that hybrid machines could soon transform how drugs get from manufacturers to patients – with happy consequences for the planet as a whole.
Chained down
If anyone can reflect on the monumental shifts in pharmaceutical supply chains, it’s Patricia Turney. Starting back in the mid-1990s, she spent most of her working life at Amgen, stationed everywhere from manufacturing operations to raw material supply. In 2016, she finally became the California giant’s vice president of external supply, no small feat at a company with annual revenue topping $25bn. And as Turney, since 2020 senior vice president of operations at Arcutis Biotherapeutics, emphasises, her long career has seen the supply chain only grow in importance. “Even in the past few years – and with the pandemic – much more visibility has been given to the supply chain.” This can be appreciated in a number of ways. Covid certainly has a role to play here – but that’s also shadowed by the growing sophistication of other medical products. Complex gene therapies, for instance, now enjoy a CAGR of 27.85% and will soon be worth $1.2bn globally. Beyond medications, Turney also highlights autoinjectors and other sensitive products that dovetail biological and mechanical components. It goes without saying, she adds, that all this requires robust and efficient transport containers. “It’s really complex,” she says, “if you have to keep something frozen, and you want to get it to remote parts of the world.” And though Arcutis is currently focused on products that can travel at ambient temperatures, it’s still important they’re not
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exposed to extremes – if nothing else because they risk hurting patients. Yet despite their rising importance, medication containers have traditionally suffered from a number of drawbacks. That’s true of both so-called ‘passive’ and ‘active’ containers. The passive model, for its part, simply involves insulated containers with no active temperature controls, problematic if they’re being carried to different parts of the world. It’s all well and good, for instance, if a drug container is lightly protected when it leaves a factory in blazing Hyderabad.
Traditional vaccine packaging comes with many risks, it must protect vaccines from bumpy roads, high or low temperatures and extreme weather.
“It’s really complex,” she says, “If you have to keep something frozen, and you want to get it to remote parts of the world.”
Patricia Turney
But what about when it lands in frozen Moscow 12 hours later? ‘Active’ containers, meanwhile, risk suffering from mechanical problems. If, for instance, a battery isn’t replaced, or a container is abandoned by the dockside, the drugs inside will likely fail. Nor is this merely a hypothetical danger. Last year, for example, nearly 2,000 Moderna vaccines were dumped after a Massachusetts hospital cleaner accidentally unplugged their freezer. More broadly, Turney suggests that these difficulties are even more pressing at a time of climate emergency. “Front and centre are not only the products themselves, but also the containers,” she explains, noting that working with shippers to be more sustainable is now common across the pharma supply chain. In practice, that includes everything from recycling old batteries to encouraging more localised shipping. To be fair, there are signs this is happening already. For instance, IBM's Supply Chain Sustainability
11billion
The number of vaccine doses administered worldwide since they first appeared in December 2020.
547 million
The number of vaccine doses that have been doled out in the US. Bloomberg
35
Manoej Paateel/
Shutterstock.com
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