Packaging, supply and logistics
adoption of something he expects to be the next significant development in the cold chain: simulation software. Typically, a company will qualify the level of risk posed to a shipment by simulating the conditions as best it can, using chamber testing. The downside here is that, in order to be accurate, tests have to simulate the duration of a shipment, which means an average of five days, and with multiple tests, the time can easily snowball into weeks. “Now, we can build a model of a shipping system within computational fluid dynamics software, and then we can run a five-day test as a simulation in ten to 15 minutes,” says Peck. “It may not be 100% accurate, but you know what, chamber testing isn’t either. I can get hundreds of simulations together to get a really good understanding of how a shipping system would work in many different supply chain scenarios, which gives me a heightened level of confidence.”
The ability to predict potential excursions on shipping routes and monitor for near real-time changes proved invaluable during the pandemic, especially for Pfizer, whose vaccine had to be between -90°C and -60°C while in transit. “The Pfizer vaccine had to be kept extremely cold using dry ice,” says Peck. “They’ve presented with their partners on how these monitors were used to
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trigger the intervention to top up [the shipments] with dry ice.” Peck too used simulation software to aid in vaccine distribution in his role as global head of process-controlled transportation at AstraZeneca. “I was heavily involved in making sure that the vaccine got all over the world, not only within [AstraZeneca’s] direct-to-government network, but also through the COVAX programme,” he says. “In that scenario, I didn’t own the supply chain. I was packing the product and handing it to the customer’s freight forwarder at the airport, and they were shipping it globally.” Used to having visibility across the supply chain, Peck had to account for and protect products “for unknown durations against unknown ambient conditions”. “The use of this simulation software allowed us to test against lots of risk profiles and get probably close to 90% accuracy,” he says. “This was good enough to allow us to focus on the implementation.” Peck compares the level of risk management on each shipment as being similar to the charge on a smartphone. “You make sure you’ve got 100% charge at the start of the day, so you’ve got as long as possible that it can work.” In practical terms, this meant conditioning the components and packing each shipment in exactly the same way to mitigate the risks determined by the simulations. After that, the shipments were in the freight company’s hands, so Peck made sure to pass on as much information as possible to freight forwarders in case of an excursion. “We’d say ‘if there’s an issue, put [the shipment] in a cold store.’ By doing that, you’re going to increase the performance duration of that shipment system and therefore protect the product.” Looking forward, Peck hopes to be part of the push to bring simulation software to more of the pharmaceutical industry – especially as cell and gene therapy products are on the increase in several areas of medicine. “Most products coming to market now will have temperature control requirements, and with biologics, the manufacture of those products is very different.” In practice, that means the risk of losing a product due to temperature excursion or physical damage is a potential loss of tens of thousands of dollars, and even worse than that, the potential for a patient in dire need of a therapeutic having to wait even longer while already living on borrowed time. It might be a doctor in a white coat that delivers the life- saving injection, but years of progress in cold chain logistics and more recently data-driven insights will be the reason it reaches the hospital safe and on time. ●
148 Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com
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