Supply chain challenges of personalised drugs, and ways to tackle them

The task for all players in the chain is to remember what is at stake here a patient’s life and how best to ensure medicines reach them on time and in desired condition.

- Jyothi Shankaran

A growing market, a challenging market, and an engrossing market. That could well be the description of the Indian pharmaceutical logistics market now and in the coming days, given the challenges of healthcare, new viruses and personalised medicines becoming the norm.

2024 was the year when the pharma industry actually saw the comingof-age of direct-to-patient logistics. "With the increased focus on biologics, specialty pharmaceuticals and personalised medicine, advancements in cold chain technology will need to keep up to ensure patients across the world continue to receive the quality service and care they deserve," says Arnab Bhattacharya, Country Manager, UPS Healthcare, India. "We've seen with our 99.9 percent on-time delivery of vaccines, the levels of reliability we can deliver as an industry.

"The future of cold chain will be shaped by five key challenges - the increased need for deep-frozen and cryogenic storage; on-going and unexpected disruption to supply chains caused by factors such as labour disruptions, shifts in manufacturing or added strain on the global freight market; enhanced costs and complexities of scale; ensuring coordination and collaboration with new entrants into the complex healthcare value chain; and increased sustainability requirements.

"We will continue to work closely as an industry to plan resilience and multi-modality in our supply chains and built-in contingencies."

Specialised solutions

Etihad Cargo's PharmaLife service has been extremely well-received by pharmaceutical shippers in India, according to Giridharan Srinivasan, Area General Manager - Indian Subcontinent, Etihad Cargo. "The launch of several PharmaLife roadshows in 2024 substantially boosted awareness and understanding of our dedicated life sciences and healthcare offering, leading to a doubling of PharmaLife volumes within a year.