As the world is closely watching the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, the pharmaceutical industry is taking on the largest and most consequential logistics challenge of our generation. Delivering a vaccine to 7.5 Billion people, while facing a dramatically reduced aircraft network and the need to rapidly scale temperature controlled transport, will be a monumental effort.
Cold chain logistics were already critical in the pharmaceutical industry, with a quarter of global biopharma sales requiring cold storage and shipping in 2018, but the Covid-19 vaccines have put a global spotlight on temperature controlled transport. The Moderna vaccine requires shipping and long-term storage conditions of -20°C and the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine requires an even lower temperature of -75°C. Being watershed developments in mRNA (Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna) and adenovirus vector (Oxford) therapeutics, these vaccines have opened the door for a revolution in vaccine production - and the way we transport it.
New solutions for temperature controlled packaging will play a crucial role in the future of vaccine and biologics transport. Avery Dennison’s recently developed ThermaVIP+™, encapsulated vacuum insulation panels, offers a cost-effective solution that tackles key challenges in cold chain packaging: temperature management, increasing shipment payloads, and reducing waste.
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High-Performance Temperature Control
ThermaVIP+™ panels have an outer Polyurethane encapsulation layer that makes them rigid and robust, offering much higher mechanical resilience than traditional vacuum insulationation panels (VIPs) and ensuring optimal performance through the rigors of transit, storage, and reassembly. They deliver thermal performance up to seven times more effective than traditional insulation solutions.
Temperature controlled packaging with ThermaVIP+™ is compliant to ISTA 7D, is validated for internal temperatures of 15 to 20°C, 2 to 8°C, and -25 to -15°C and can extend transit time periods, in certain situations, for more than 120 hours.
Maximizing Payload
For efficient distribution, packing needs to accommodate as many doses as possible per shipping. The slim and compact design of ThermaVIP+™ drastically reduces external shipping volume and provides up to a seven times greater payload compared to the popular insulation solution, polystyrene and polyurethane.
