Unlike the food industry, which is anchored by major retailers, the pharmaceutical and medical device industries are a balance of manufacturers, distributors, users and dispensers, none of which have quite the sway Walmart or Carrefour does on the movement of foodstuffs. “Simply having Merck join wouldn’t bring CVS to the table,” says Treshock. “And having Walmart Pharmacy involved wouldn’t get Pfizer to join.” So IBM stepped back, reconsidered, and turned their track and trace technology into an open-source utility. “There was great concern that the industry would [have to] turn over the keys to its data, or its responsibility, to a third-party vendor,” explains Treshock. “At the end of the day, nobody is really willing to give any one technology company the ability to do it all.” With pharmaceutical knowledge from Merck and open-source expertise from the Linux Foundation, IBM has been working with the US on a top-secret project to track its vaccine supply, as well as the public-facing Health Pass blockchain for recording vaccinations.
“The ability to share this data, to interoperate across the global supply chain, should be a utility, very much like an interstate highway or the global airport system.” Treshock continues. “Federal Express and UPS compete against each other vehemently, but they both use the same roads. The alternative is that they’d each build their own roads, which sounds absurd – but it’s what we’re doing in the data world in general and specifically in life sciences. We rely on these point-to- point connections that we’ve reached our ability to scale. With this road network operating as a not-for- profit entity that doesn’t itself seek rents beyond what it needs to maintain itself, then participants, potentially competitors, could utilise it without fear of enriching each other.”
The pandemic has already gone a long way to breaking the binary opposition of competition and collaboration. Speaking at the IPFMA media briefing on Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing on 23 April 2021, Roger Connor, president for global vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline and the vaccine CEO representative for Covax, highlighted the work of the Covax Manufacturing Task Force in supporting the free flow of raw materials and ensuring that any constrictions in the global supply chain are addressed as quickly as possible. As he put it, vaccine manufacturers are now “look[ing] for collaboration, ensuring the free flow of goods, and getting ahead of bottlenecks – monitoring supply and demand and looking to see where the next one is coming [so we can] act on it now, rather than reacting to it.”
By way of example, Connor noted GSK’s willingness to make excess stock of glass vials available to any manufacturer facing shortages. Moreover, when the company’s own vaccine
Medical Device Developments /
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