UAV PROJECT | WHITE PAPER PUBLISHED | Insights into the Use of Drones and their Potential as Part of the Healthcare Supply Chain

Pharma.Aero shares the results of the UAV Project by publishing the White Paper of WP 3 – exploring the use of drones and their potential as part of the Life Science and Medtech logistic chain, thus interconnecting the traditional and modern airfreight worlds.

Our project team investigated Malawi’s healthcare logistics that include drones in the multimodal process of transporting vaccines with strict cold-chain requirements from the factory in Europe to patients in remote areas of Africa. The project’s goal was to offer unprecedented insights by mapping the vaccines’ journey from factory to patients and to explore modalities of further integrating the drones.

Read the document here: WHITE PAPER – UAV PROJECT WP 3 

Emergency health situations caused by natural disasters where populations can be cut from any supply or medical help, war and conflict zones that are impossible to reach by organizations to support the affected population or simply topography and poor infrastructure that slows down and compromises intervention in communities from hard-to-reach areas require smart and sophisticated high technological transport modes, safe in use for and by humans.

In today’s world, we can no longer look at a linear end-to-end supply chain, but we need to start looking at a fully integrated logistics eco-system where logistics modes are intertwined. Therefore, it is important to evaluate and learn from use cases and explore opportunities to build on the progress that has been made by using UAVs as part of the last-mile delivery of medicines and vaccines for underserved communities.

By creating such a UAV roadmap, we might identify aspects and elements that need further investigation and analysis to achieve the best framework for the wider use and integration of UAVs in pharma logistics.

Fig. 1: Current Journey of COVID-19 Vaccines from the Factory in Belgium to Health Facilities in Malawi

Project Team

Olivier Defawe, Project Manager

Trevor Caswell, Project Lead and Board Liaison

Jeremy Mitchell, Project Lead

Sara Van Lerberghe, Project Coordinator

Frank Van Gelder, Secretary General of Pharma.Aero