What You Should Know:
– UPS Healthcare today announced it is enhancing its specialty pharmaceutical offerings by establishing UPS Cold Chain Solutions, a comprehensive suite of cold chain technologies, best-in-class capabilities to support healthcare customers.
– UPS Cold Chain Solutions is purpose-built to provide pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers and laboratories a full, end-to-end cold chain service offering, including storage and distribution, transportation, visibility, and quality assurance capabilities to meet their complex demands for critical products around the world.
Why It Matters
Chronic and life-threatening diseases, including cancers, respiratory, autoimmune and cardiovascular conditions, are the fastest growing disease categories in the world, creating a rapid acceleration in the development of biologically derived, temperature-controlled drugs and therapies. According to the Biopharma Cold Chain Sourcebook, cold chain trends show 48 percent growth between 2018 and 2024 for drugs that require at least 2 to 8 degrees Celsius storage and shipping. Additionally, the overall market for cold chain services (packaging, transportation and data services) is expected to significantly accelerate growth over the next three years, growing by 24 percent by 2024, after posting a 10 percent increase from 2019 to 2020.
UPS Cold Chain Solution Capabilities
UPS Cold Chain Solutions is part of an aggressive strategy for UPS Healthcare to expand its offerings and capabilities, including:
· Powerful temperature-controlled storage capacities
· Storage and package customization for customers
· UPS European Cold Chain Ground Network expansion – ground fleets, dedicated experts on-site, etc.
· Transportation efficiencies through unique delivery options
· Precise monitoring with UPS® Premier technology
· The construction of new GDP-compliant, healthcare-licensed distribution (HLD) facilities, as well expansions and cold chain retrofit projects to existing facilities
“Our customers have been taking advantage of our cold chain capabilities for years, but the pandemic caused UPS to move even faster to enhance an integrated set of cold chain solutions to support the future of the pharmaceutical and medical device industry,” said Wes Wheeler, UPS Healthcare president. “UPS’s near-perfect, on-time delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine proves how effectively and efficiently our network handles biologically derived drugs, even at extreme temperatures.”
“UPS sets a high bar for excellence in cold chain delivery and logistics, and these current and future investments in innovative solutions will ensure we keep pushing the bar higher,” Wheeler said. “For our customers, we will remain focused on delivering on our commitment to ‘Quality Focused. Patient Driven.’”
