Clinical supply & logistics
Chain of command
The pandemic has disrupted much of medical life and clinical trial supply chains are no exception. In part, this is a question of necessity. With lockdowns making traditional trials impossible, organisers have had to adapt. Amid the upheavals of the past 18 months, meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly seeing opportunities. Andrea Valentino talks to Javier Garcia Vela, a transport and logistic services team lead at Roche, to understand how clinical trial supply chains differ from the rest of the pharmaceutical profession, the pressures his team has been under in the age of Covid-19, and how new technology is making trials easier for patients and researchers alike.
linical trials have been an established part of medical life for 1,000 years. As long ago as the 11th century, after all, Chinese physicians carefully evaluated the efficacy of Shangdang ginseng, testing whether it helped patients run faster (it did). In the 18th century, Dr Caleb Parry investigated whether expensive Turkish rhubarb was a better laxative than its cheaper English counterpart (it wasn’t). And by the 1940s, Sir Austin Bradford Hill, an English epidemiologist and statistician, was pioneering randomised controlled trials across several London hospitals. All the same, it’s hard to confuse modern tests with their antique cousins. That’s primarily thanks to their scale. While Parry and Sir Austin’s samples numbered in the dozens, most contemporary trials typically test between several hundred and 3,000 people. The latest vaccine trials are larger still. It goes without saying that getting regular drug deliveries to that many people, sometimes for years at a time, isn’t easy. No wonder, too, that the clinical
C Clinical Trials Insight /
www.worldpharmaceuticals.net
trial supply chain industry has become such a huge business. According to one estimate, it’s a market that was worth $10.9bn in 2019 and one that’s expected to enjoy a CAGR of 6.6% until the middle of this decade.
And if anything, it’s a field that has only increased in value over the past 18 months. With governments and pharmaceutical companies scrambling to secure a vaccine for Covid-19, they’ve had to rely on supply chains more than ever. Nor has it been simple. From instituting at-home trials to keeping drugs secure at scale, the pandemic has stretched traditional supply chains to their limits. Yet the pandemic and its consequences also offer opportunities. With agility as their watchword, some of the industry’s biggest players have used the recent upheavals to sharpen flexibility and customer choice – with benefits up and down the supply chain.
Trial by fire
In certain ways, the demands of clinical trials differ little from the pharmaceutical industry more broadly.
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