Avoiding Medicine Spoilage During Transportation and Storage

In an industry requiring the transportation and storage of millions of biologics every year, how do we avoid spoilage?

Nearly half of the world’s top-selling drugs require a temperature controlled environment to remain viable. But in an industry requiring the transportation and storage of millions of biologics every year, how do we avoid spoilage?

The Wall Street Journal recently featured an article from UPS on Cold Chain. The article highlighted the dangers associated with transporting temperature sensitive materials (including medicines) and outlined four different ways in which these risks can be mitigated including:

1. Optimize packaging for known ambient profiles
2. Optimize shipping modalities
3. Monitor and intervene to prevent spoilage
4. Analyze and optimize the Cold Chain

While all the points mentioned are very important to successful cold chain transportation, the first point stuck out to many of us here at STERIS as a large number of our test and technical support services are in the transportation arena around the viability of packaging.

All too often our engineers have been called in to rescue a packaging solution which had been an afterthought at the design stage and required drastic redesign later on in the process when it was found not to be fit for purpose.

We go into a lot more detail about the importance of considering your packaging from an early stage of development in our article about optimizing packaging solutions to avoid delays

The full Wall Street Journal, which is itself a shortened version of UPS’ own ‘Creating a Better Cold Chain’ white paper can be viewed here.