Today the Airfreight Pharma 2023 conference kicks off in Athens. On this first of two days, the conference will cover some of the most important issues across the industry, including the increasing value of healthcare treatments versus the value chain needed, future strategic decision-making in pharma logistics and cross-industry collaboration.
Trevor Caswell, chairman of Pharma.Aero, leads the introduction to the event with Frank van Gelder, secretary general. They emphasised that sustainability “has become part of everything we do”, and laid out their “project pipline”, entailing: last-mile distribution, quality assurance, digitalisation, pharma innovation and emergency logistics for disruptive events.
The secretary general says the current medical innovations to watch are: advanced mRNA technology boosts with new vaccine trials, TELE-health, which currently shows a 94 per cent patient satisfaction rate, data-integration and AI adaptation (with AI being used in rapid diagnostics), moves to stamp-out cyber threats, securing healthcare data and capitalising on augmented and virtual reality.
One take away from the conference’s introduction is the changing landscape of clinical trials. With 452,604 currently in use, there has been an “exponential increase”, in addition to an increase in complexity, according to van Gelder.
He added that this has therefore increased the use of AI and hybrid management, in addition to complex logistics and cyber security: “Revolution in the care is revolution in the air … The medical world and the air freight world are not as far away from each other as you think”.
Image: Trevor Caswell speaks at Airfreight Pharma 2023
