Episode 046 | March 6, 2023 | 37:46
Guest: Jeroen van Loo
Published: March 6, 2023
Duration: 37:46
Description
How do you keep the medicines at the right temperature levels throughout the supply chain? On this week’s episode we are guested by Jeroen van Loo, who heads Cold Chain Monitoring for Elpro Global. Joachim and Jeroen talk a lot about that, but also about the circular programs they are implementing and the sustainability aspects.
Full transcript
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From the start of production until it is handed over to a patient, you want to know what the temperature flow is of that product so that you can safely say this product is safe to be used. Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Healthcare Podcast. I am Joachim from Green Innovation Group. Today I am joined by Jeroen from Elpro, working with cold chain monitoring. How do you keep medicines at the right temperature levels throughout the supply chain? We talk a lot about that, and we go into the circular programs they have at Elpro trying to get their data loggers back.
I am global business management at Elpro and focused on temperature monitoring. In regards to sustainability and environment, these are huge topics. We try to come up with solutions to reduce our presence on the world. Elpro produces monitoring solutions for the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare — divided in two parts: small data loggers for monitoring products in transit, and sophisticated systems to monitor warehouses and production areas. I talk today mostly out of my experience for cold chain products in transit, because there I think there is a big change going on. We are aware that the products we sell are not the best from an environmental perspective, but contradictory — you need them to guarantee the quality of the products they are monitoring.
The cold chain is the part of the supply chain where everything is cooled. Huge in pharma — a lot of medicine needs to be cooled. From the drawdown report and IPCC, cooling is one of the key battles. The supply chain life of a medicine: you start with API — the basic ingredients. The API goes into production, processed into a final product (let’s say a vaccine). From start of production until it is handed over to a patient, you want to know the temperature flow so you can safely say this product is safe to use. They place small data loggers — USB ones you plug into a computer for a full report, or real-time ones using IoT connectivity to transfer information to a cloud-based software solution where you can see location and condition. That is the added value: you can safely say when the data logger says it was okay, the product is fit to be injected into a person’s body.
With data loggers we reduce waste — for sure that from a temperature perspective the medication has been handled correctly. We use top quality components. The data loggers are shipped all over the world and at the end the functionality is finished, but the components have an economy lifecycle of 10 to 20 years. Flying them from Denmark to the US and then discarding them is not the way forward. We have been promoting to customers: gather products in a box and give us a call when it is full. So far we retrieved them and recycled them in an environmentally less good way. Now we think — we can reuse it again and again because we know how many times those components have been used. Everything is recorded in the pharmaceutical industry. We can reuse certain components to deliver new loggers, creating a circular life for our data loggers. This is an initiative within Elpro and with customers over the last six months.
The majority is still being discarded the old way, but there has been a lot of positive energy. You need to work together. Customers purchase the electronic device so you lose control over it. With real-time data loggers, the industry is going in a different direction — customers may not purchase the device anymore, they pay per use. The challenge is how to get them back. If you send one device to a clinic in Africa, the carbon footprint of sending it back might not be efficient.
I worked earlier in power tools and helped introduce a leasing model. It was difficult dialogue but leasing aligns incentives beautifully in a circular economy. You become responsible. With real-time data loggers I can see where they are sent to and track them. It is always dangerous to say we are green per definition — if you produce something you are not green. But we want to reduce that impact as much as possible. Therefore we try to come up with new business models implementing circular economy to minimize impact. Cold-chain packaging materials are also being reused. I have to team up with more parties — customers, packaging companies, forwarders. If we team up as an industry, we will get the best results.
Within five years 90% of our data loggers will be in that circular economy and used multiple times over a set of years. That is the way forward.
On COVID — in the end we had it under control. Temperature ranges of COVID vaccines at the time were minus 70 degrees, which makes transport more difficult. Time over time those temperatures go down. The pharmaceutical industry needs time to develop a product. In the beginning storage conditions are low because products are more stable cold. As you learn more about products, you find they react well at higher temperatures, so future COVID vaccines will be stored at different temperature ranges.
The most common temperature ranges are 2 to 8 and 15 to 25 degrees. With new biological medication, time to market is shorter, so we see a tremendous increase of temperature ranges below 40, dry ice (-79), or even cryo (-196). Going colder is the winning trend, but when a medication becomes older, storage temperatures go up — because you have more data to guarantee stability.
How is it cooled in practice? Phase-changing materials, gel cooling blocks, active containers, passive containers — they are very inventive in keeping that temperature at a certain level. All being tested by institutes in real practice and in labs. Nowadays they also have computer simulation programs.
What waste do you see? If products are returned, 90% of the waste we can reuse. For that reason it is important we get those products back. Sometimes something happens in a supply chain and you might break the temperature range so the medicine cannot live up to QA standards anymore. We advise customers how to evaluate temperature excursions and how to set the loggers with appropriate thresholds — using multiple temperatures based on the product’s stability data. That reduces alarms and reduces waste.
The key challenge for full circular transition is a standardized way of getting the product back efficiently. And still maintaining the quality that we have today. We have done research, on paper it all fits, now we are bringing it into the real world. I hope to sit on this podcast again in a year and tell you the accomplishments. Thank you so much Jeroen. Thanks to all our listeners — please follow the podcast.