The Importance of Precision Logistics

PC: There are some cell and gene therapies that require “needle-to-needle logistics.” Could you describe what this process consists of, along with its benefits?

The whole concept of cell and gene—and some of this innovation—is that cells are extracted from a patient's body. They're literally re-engineered and put back into a patient's body to more organically fight off some of these diseases. It's quite a miracle. Cell and gene in terms of a volume opportunity for logistics today is very small, but you can see the success, especially, in terms of the body probably being the best tool to use to fight some of these kinds of diseases. Cell and gene therapy is extremely promising.

With needle-to-needle logistics, you can see the complication because you’re literally extracting cells out of a person. You need time and temperature management to get those cells to what I'll call “the lab.” Those cells go in, they get re-engineered. They are obviously very critical—somewhat unstable—and then they need to be brought back to the patient. And when I say the patient, usually it's back to a point-of-care facility in which it's managed by a healthcare professional, but it's a very precision-like move. We're not talking pallet loads or trailer loads of stuff. We're talking about, someone's “humanness” in cells being brought back and forth.

If something goes wrong with the extraction—because the manufacturing process does take a little bit of time—or God forbid that when the cells have been re-engineered, or are going back to the patient, the whole process has to start over again, and now you're impacting patients' lives. So this needle-to needle-logistics is going to be a much more significant part of healthcare innovation. In the future, we're going to start to see precision logistics be a much more important part of what any logistics company that's focused on healthcare just has to be good at.

PC: How do you envision the value and impact of precision logistics developing over the next five years?

In five years, if you are a logistics or transportation company that does not have precision logistics capabilities, you're not in healthcare. At the end of the day, to move control room temperature or ambient medications and devices, it's pretty easy stuff. It's moving product from point A to point B. There are some complications around information for regulatory requirements and some of those things. but if you're going to claim to be in healthcare, you really have to be good at two things.

One, you have to be very good at understanding regulation and enabling audit defensibility for your customers. Two, when it comes to this precision logistics, you have to be very good at keeping things stored and delivered on temperature and on time. The equipment's getting better, the SOPs are getting better, but it's also a cultural thing. You need an organization to say, “there's no exception, this has to be delivered today. This has to be delivered before 8 am.” There has to be this culture of service, that you're going to have happen if you stay in healthcare five years from now, and if cell and gene—and precision logistics—gets as big as we think it will.