When a breakthrough has only 48 hours to save a life

A therapy produced in San Francisco needs to travel via Brussels Airport and reach the patient within a 48-hour window from formulation to administration. Suddenly, customs, storage, cold chain, flights, ground handling, transport and timing are no longer just logistics. They become part of the medical outcome.

Personalised medicine just became very personalised.

In their session, Cinthia Travaglini from UCB and Jeroen Desaer from Brussels Airport explore the invisible but critical logistics behind these sorts of operations.

Cinthia Travaglini brings the pharmaceutical perspective. As therapies become more personalised, complex and time-sensitive, the supply chain increasingly has to be designed alongside the therapy itself. What can go wrong between production and administration? And how do you build a treatment when its journey to the patient is part of the treatment?

Jeroen Desaer brings the cargo and airport perspective. Moving these therapies internationally requires dozens of actors to work as one system: airlines, handlers, customs, warehouses, transport companies and healthcare partners. With his background in both airline cargo and airport network development, he looks at what it takes to make that chain fast, controlled and reliable when there is almost no margin for error.