Feature
Cold-Chain Challenges
Heat Up
Diagnosis: for temperature-controlled products, complex supply lines jeopardize
drug efficacy and patient care. Prescription: consolidate the cold chain.
By John Conroy
If you’re a pharmaceutical manufacturer or wholesaler, you want the
insulin that you shipped Monday to
arrive at the doctor’s office on Tuesday,
ready for patient appointments. You
don’t want the containers perched on
pallets in the sun outside a cargo terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport
for two hours on Tuesday afternoon,
waiting for refrigerated trucks.
As the global market for insulin and
other bioengineered drugs continues to
grow, this scenario and others are putting
a strain on all the links in the supply
chain for temperature-controlled products—pharmaceutical manufacturers,
wholesalers, packagers, and third-party
logistics (3PL) providers alike.
Given the growing global reach of
biologics, the problem is even more
acute outside the United States. David
Bang, CEO of LifeConEx LLC (
Plantation, FL), told Future Pharmaceutical
magazine that a typical international delivery of cold chain pharmaceuticals can
involve “three airports, three ground
handlers, two different airlines, two
truckers, one freight forwarder, and one
customs broker.” Different regulations in
two countries and three different climate
zones compound the complexity, he
noted. A joint venture between DHL
Global Forwarding and Lufthansa Cargo,
Bang’s company was established to
help alleviate this problem by offering
end-to-end transport of temperature-controlled drugs.
The industry is responding with several solutions, among them efforts like
Decreasing the amount of handling along the supply chain, with third-party logistics assistance,
could reduce product risk. Photo courtesy Cardinal Health.
