A partnership between thermal packaging firm Cold Chain Technologies and Californian company Cloudleaf is helping in the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.

The combined offering should enhance real-time visibility for end-to-end distribution of temperature-sensitive drugs and biologics. It will augment thermal packaging with Cloudleaf’s digital visibility platform to prevent spoilage and improve delivery efforts for critical drugs and biologics, including vaccines deployed to battle Covid-19.

Massachusetts-based Cold Chain Technologies provides reusable and single-use thermal packaging for the distribution and last-kilometre transport of temperature-sensitive products for the life sciences industry.

The offering will enable real-time, holistic and actionable insights into the location and condition of temperature-sensitive drugs and biologics, including the Covid-19 vaccines being transported in Cold Chain Technologies’ thermal shipping containers.

The biopharma industry loses about $35bn annually as a result of failures in temperature-controlled logistics. Having real-time visibility into vaccine and drug shipments is critical in mitigating loss. Cold Chain Technologies recognises this and has taken proactive steps with its partnership with Cloudleaf to ensure these losses are reduced.

This partnership aims to improve supply chain visibility and agility for Cold Chain Technologies’ customers who rely on its 50-plus years of experience in providing temperature-sensitive shipping to deliver critical treatments safely and effectively to the public. In the short term, it will play a role in safely getting Covid-19 vaccines to patients.

“The need for life sciences companies to have insight into their cold chains has never been more apparent than with the Covid-19 vaccine rollout,” said Ranjeet Banerjee, CEO of Cold Chain Technologies. “In choosing a partner to enhance visibility into the end-to-end cold chain, it was crucial that we be able to utilise the latest and most advanced IoT sensor technologies, along with near real-time tracking and data-analytics capabilities which give our customers visibility into the location of their shipments.”

Cloudleaf’s platform is sensor agnostic and enables containers with a prescriptive analysis of vaccine conditions down to the unit level.

“We have tripled the production of our temperature-sensitive parcels for vaccines in recent months, and we’re confident this added layer of supply chain transparency will be instrumental in getting society back to business as usual,” said Banerjee.

As the Covid-19 vaccine rollout ramps up, Cold Chain Technologies will be able to provide its customers round-the-clock visibility, including product location and condition, to ensure vaccines arrive on time with maintained temperature requirement adherence throughout the entire shipping process.

“There is an enormous opportunity to improve the cold chain logistics for temperature-sensitive drugs and vaccines,” said Mahesh Veerina, CEO of Cloudleaf. “We’re thrilled to combine the capabilities of our platform in real-time data collection with Cold Chain Technologies’ decades of experience in cold chain shipping to contribute to the quick and safe delivery of vaccines around the world.”

Beyond vaccines, the combination will track critical parameters for drugs and biologics such as location, temperature and vibration, along with data streams about weather, traffic, flight schedules and more, to remove blind spots in the supply chain and flag potential issues so that they can be rectified before product is compromised.

Cloudleaf provides digital supply chains with insights from ground truth and real-time decision-making. Its SaaS platform leverages hyper-scale cloud, digital twin, AI, ML and IoT technologies to deliver continuous visibility and intelligence.