Cold chain definition

An employee makes dry ice pellets at Capitol Carbonic, a dry ice factory in Baltimore in Nov. 2020. Dry ice helps keep COVID-19 vaccines cool during transport. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images Vaccines are like milk. Both make us stronger, but if stored at the wrong temperature, The reason? At least in the context of COVID-19, shots rely on messenger RNAs — particles, which in oversimplified terms, carry the key instructions for teaching your immune system to fight the coronavirus. mRNAs are fickle things, or as chemists would describe them, they're "unstable." They break down quickly unless adequately protected from those pesky enzymes which eat away at them. Enter cold storage. As countries race — and Of the three vaccines approved for rollout in many countries, the Pfizer vaccine wins for most high maintenance with storage requirements at -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degree Fahrenheit) — a bit chillier than record low temps at the South Pole. Pfizer announced Friday, however, that the vaccine can actually be kept at around typical home freezer temperatures (a balmy -25 to -15 degrees Celsius or -13 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit) for up to two weeks. The Pfizer vaccine's new storage requirements are more in line with the Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines. Moderna can be kept between -25 and -15 degrees Celsius (-13 and 5 degrees Fahrenheit) according to the Centers for Disease Control, while AstraZeneca can go a bit warmer at up to 2-8 degrees Celsius (36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit). B...

Welcome to the Cold Chain Resource Center PAHO’s Immunization Unit welcomes all health workers, EPI managers, the managers with responsibility for cold chain and supply chain operations, and the general audience to our website. Today’s immunization cold chain and supply chain operations have been one of the key elements in expanding the provision of daily immunization services and allowing more people to be protected from vaccine-preventable diseases. When the PAHO Immunization Unit was established in 1977, both PAHO and national program staff understood that the immunization cold chain was the dorsal column of the program. To assure that vaccines provide the expected benefits when a patient receives an immunization, epidemiologist and health staff understand that each dose of vaccine administered has to be potent for protecting the recipient against the targeted disease(s). To achieve this objective the Immunization Unit, in PAHO, focused on five pillars: • advising countries to use good quality refrigeration equipment; • training of health staff in managing vaccines and their equipment; • carrying out evaluations on cold chain and supply chain operations; • carrying out research and development in the area of cold chain technology – both soft and hard; • improving management capacity and skills to support all operations related to the cold chain and supply chain, to introduce new vaccines. Key Achievements Q 1 – What is the cold chain? The cold chain is a set of rules an...

A cold chain is a temperature-controlled The Apart from biologics, recent times have also seen the emergence of different types of precision medicine breakthroughs like cellular therapies, biomarker testing, and regenerative medicine in the form of stem cells. Transportation of material to enable the completion of these therapies come under the ambit of cold chain. Blood products and certain vaccines also need a cold chain for their preservation. According to the 2017 edition of Pharmaceutical Commerce’s annual Biopharma Cold Chain Sourcebook, the growth of temperature-controlled products is occurring at more than twice that of non-temperature-controlled products, indicating how important cold chain is going to be in the pharmaceutical supply chain in the times to come. Another push for cold chain comes from the reinforcement of Good Distribution Practices (GDPs) and specifically, their insistence on temperature monitoring for all types of pharmaceutical products to ensure better quality assurance, thereby gradually blurring the line between refrigeration-requiring products like biologics and those that didn’t require it like tablets. The slow but sure spread of biologics and biosimilars to hitherto untapped markets like Asia is another factor contributing to the potential rise of cold chain system. According to an article on PharmaiQ, airport mishandling is one of the biggest causes of cold chain breaches. As the demand for temperature-controlled products spans further ov...