Pharma supply chain – tomorrow’s challenges

 Pharma supply chain – tomorrow’s challenges

The requirements on life sciences and healthcare supply chains are becoming increasingly complex. The shift to biopharma, personalized medicine, and decentralised clinical trials are driving the need for colder, smaller, and more direct logistics solutions. At the same time, supply chain professionals increasingly require end-to-end and real-time visibility to ensure higher resiliency and agility in daily operations. Condition monitoring, asset tracking, and security status are cornerstones of any visibility solution.

The Covid-19 pandemic has only highlighted the need for speed and the complexities of global supply chain for the life sciences and healthcare sectors. Perhaps, the pandemic has only exacerbated a previously existing problem – the dependence on foreign manufacturers of drug ingredients and finished products that has resulted in shortages of critical medicines. Experts suggest the remedy is to create a domestic manufacturing capability, adopt new production technologies, and create partnership between the public and private sectors.

As research scientists race to develop treatments and vaccines for new viruses in months not years, key stakeholders in the clinical trials supply chain are facing unique challenges. There are many logistics demands during each clinical trial, and this underlines the need for new strategies and effective management of the supply chain. The overarching aims of clinical trial supply are to ensure the safety and maintain the efficacy of products and treatments. Regulatory requirements, cost considerations, fast response to global emergencies; the healthcare world constantly demands more expertise and greater capabilities. The complexities of tomorrow’s healthcare supply chain do not end at clinical trials. Once the drugs and therapies are approved and ready to be rolled out the distribution logistics becomes key and the scale of operations and complexities grow manifold depending on the urgency of situations.

“It’s not unthinkable: We’re living that reality today, because of a poorly designed global supply chain we depend on for our nation’s most essential medicines,” wrote Eric Edwards in a recent piece he wrote for Harvard Business Review (HBR). Edwards, cofounder and chief executive officer of Phlow, a public benefit pharmaceutical corporation that is reimagining the domestic production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), key starting materials, and finished pharmaceutical products critical to the US health care, was referring to what he calls “an intolerable situation” in the US. But global supply chains are fragile and they are not really built for resilience.

“It is an intolerable situation, and it need not be this way — provided we rethink our dedication to these global supply chains. Instead, we should secure a fully domestic capability to produce the most commonly used and vital medicines — from pain relievers to asthma inhalers to antibiotics — and be able to activate it at a moment’s notice when a potential global shortage looms,” Edwards wrote in HBR.

Supply chain is the link between the laboratory and the marketplace and it now needs a thorough revision. Most pharma have complex supply chains that are under-utilised, inefficient and ill-equipped to cope with the sort of products coming down the pipeline. Various reports predict that in order to meet the demands of a fast evolving marketplace and the shift from patient to outcome, the pharma supply chain will need to undergo a radical overhaul.

There are numerous forces reshaping the environment in which the industry operates and dictate the need for a different sort of supply chain. More diverse product types and therapies with shorter product lifecycles; new ways for assessing, approving and monitoring medicines; increasing emphasis on outcomes; new modes of delivering healthcare where the care is pushed into the community and where access to information on patients will become as important as the products themselves; the growing importance of emerging markets; a greater public scrutiny impacting the ability to manage risk and compliance; and, tougher environmental controls and regulations will oblige companies to strategically reassess their supply chain approach.

New technologies are emerging to help pharma companies manufacture a wider and more complex range of medicines, distribute them and also to speed the interface with the patient and getting closer than ever. The supply chains for designing, manufacturing and distributing pharmaceuticals and medical devices plus those providing healthcare services will integrate so that all partners can see the full picture and help them plan ahead more accurately and cost-effective.