Icelandic firm Controlant and Deutsche Telekom have developed a way to bring real-time, end-to-end visibility to pharma supply chains.

Announced at last month’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, the Saga Card should bring visibility into the journey of medicines and vaccines, from production to patient, enabling enterprise pharma and logistics service providers to ensure medicines reach patients safely while reducing waste.

The speed and scale of the development of medicines have never been greater. Clinical trials, personalised medicine, and complex therapies such as cell and gene offer opportunities to improve health outcomes for millions. But many of the new medicines are increasingly sensitive and complex, posing problems in transporting them from laboratories to patients.

Saga Card is a compact IoT device to extend visibility further into the highly regulated pharma supply chain. The robust, energy-efficient monitoring device represents a leap from today’s real-time visibility at the pallet level, down to secondary packaging, including cases and cartons.

When combined with Controlant’s Aurora cloud platform, it will provide real-time inventory visibility at country, region and city levels to pharma companies, logistics companies serving the pharma industry, and packaging providers.

With real-time, end-to-end visibility, pharma companies can ensure medicines reach the patient at the right quality, time and place. The Saga Card should also increase transparency in pharma supply chains, providing data as medicines cross multiple handover points in their journey to the patient, making it easier for pharma companies to monitor and control inventories and reduce waste.

The flight-ready device has functionalities such as location and temperature monitoring, light detection to sense when a box has been opened, and an accelerometer to sense when a box starts or stops moving.

Deutsche Telekom contributed global connectivity based on NuSIM technology, an energy- and space-saving option tailored to IoT applications such as the Saga Card. NuSIM moves the SIM functionality from the physical SIM card directly to the chipset which saves on external components and contributes to the small size. The NuSIM (iot.telekom.com/en/networks-tariffs/iot-sim-cards/nusim) is not a physical part that requires shipping to the device manufacturing site; a fully digital process provides the NuSIM data right into the device during production. Deutsche Telekom’s roaming footprint allows worldwide usage of the Saga Card.

Nordic Semiconductor (www.nordicsemi.com) provided the nRF9160 SiP (system-in-package), featuring a cellular modem with LTE-M and NB-IoT that enables the cellular connectivity for the card. The SiP’s size and form factor are fit for purpose for the pharma industry and, along with the sensors and integrated NuSIM, enable the functionalities that let Saga Card bring end-to-end visibility to pharma supply chains.

Saga Card uses a zinc-based battery supplied by Imprint Energy (www.imprintenergy.com) that is less greenhouse-gas intensive than lithium counterparts. The thin battery suits a compact device designed to monitor smaller units of product, with the right battery life to secure monitoring along every step of the chain.

Avery Dennison (www.averydennison.com), a materials science and digital ID company, and CCL Design (www.ccldesign.com), a designer and manufacturer of printed, functional and decorative products, are facilitating the assembly and manufacturing of the device at scale. Sodaq (sodaq.com), a company specialising in low-power tracking and sensing, has supported the development of Saga Card and advised on the industrial design of the product.

Controlant is used by eleven of the top pharma and logistics companies because its products are pharma-compliant and industry-proven. It is leveraging its industry expertise in a pilot phase with early adopters for the Saga Card.

The healthcare sector contributes around five per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Product waste contributes to this, with around 30% of medicines and vaccines wasted along the supply chain, for reasons including temperature excursions and lack of visibility.

Saga Card (www.controlant.com/saga-card) enables more efficient inventory management and visibility. With visibility into inventory and the flow of medicines and vaccines, the pharma industry can reduce its environmental impact and take a step towards achieving zero-waste supply chains.

“Saga Card is an innovation designed to enable pharma supply chains to deliver today’s and tomorrow’s transformative medicines, including complex new treatments, to patients around the world, safely and sustainably,” said Gisli Herjolfsson, CEO of Controlant (www.controlant.com). “Flexibility and creativity have defined the collaboration of the consortium partnership that has brought Saga Card from the drawing board to reality.”

Dennis Nikles, CEO of Deutsche Telekom IoT (iot.telekom.com), added: “In cooperation with Controlant, we enable reliable healthcare that addresses the individual needs of patients. With NuSIM, the industry has a minimum hardware and software footprint, cost-efficient implementations, and minimal power consumption, a winning concept for many applications.”