Photo: © Grzegorz Kieca
FedEx today launched a dedicated life sciences division, as the pharmaceutical industry moves towards increasingly complex therapies that require faster, more specialised logistics networks.
The express giant said the FedEx Life Sciences division would support the movement of pharmaceuticals, biologics, medical devices, clinical trial materials, and other healthcare shipments, reflecting the “growing demand for greater precision, visibility, and reliability across healthcare supply chains.
FedEx has appointed Nick Gennari, current president of global healthcare & life sciences, healthcare and commercial sales, to lead the new business.
The company said its healthcare business already generated around $10bn in annual revenue globally and has been supported by investments, including six Life Sciences Centers, IATA CEIV Pharma Corporate Certification and its FedEx Surround monitoring platform.
The announcement comes as the industry prepares for the commercialisation of personalised medicines, cell and gene therapies and radioligand treatments, which one supply chain expert says will fundamentally change how pharmaceutical products move by air.
“The processes that are in place for big pharma don’t work for these products,” Frank Van Gelder secretary general of Pharma.Aero told The Loadstar.
While conventional pharmaceutical logistics has focused largely on vaccines and temperature-controlled medicines, Mr Van Gelder explained that emerging treatments were often significantly more time-sensitive, higher in value and, in some cases, radioactive.
“These products come all with different characteristics,” he said, adding that future supply chains would require “quicker, faster, shorter lead times; customs needs to be aligned, 100% traceability and 100% visibility.”
He also argued that airports and cargo handlers would increasingly need to move towards “commodity-specific ground handling”, rather than treating all pharmaceutical shipments in the same way.
“People say, ‘oh, Frank, but this is a niche’. I don’t think it is a niche,” he said, pointing to advances in oncology and precision medicine that could significantly improve survival rates for some cancers.
FedEx said its new organisation would “combine dedicated healthcare expertise with advanced monitoring capabilities to help customers manage increasingly specialised shipments”.
However, Mr Van Gelder argued that despite advances in tracking technology, the pharmaceutical industry still lacked genuine end-to-end supply chain visibility because of fragmented logistics networks.
“The technology is not the limiting factor, but human intervention is,” he said. “You can follow your [ecommerce] box you ordered in China… until it arrives at your door. We don’t have that in pharma.”
He said pharmaceutical manufacturers themselves should take the lead in creating open platforms that bring together data from airlines, ground handlers ,and freight forwarders to provide full shipment visibility, while ensuring cyber security for the increasingly valuable therapies.
As new treatments move from clinical trials into commercial production, Mr Van Gelder said, the industry had an opportunity “to redesign the air cargo pharma supply chain” to meet the demands of the next generation of healthcare.
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