Throughout the pandemic, all eyes were on those tasked with creating vaccines and treatments to stop the spread and impact of COVID-19. And while an effective vaccine is critical to moving to a post-COVID world, it’s just the first step in the complicated process of delivering lifesaving treatments to billions of people.
Once a vaccine is created, it must be properly scaled and produced and safely transported – equally critical tasks to successfully addressing a global pandemic. And to do that, companies rely on advanced automation technology that works behind the scenes to create and protect treatments from conception to formulation to consumption.
As the leading automation technology company serving the life sciences industry, Emerson has been helping the rapidly expanding set of pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and other healthcare organizations to fast-track research, development and delivery of lifesaving COVID-19 treatments.
Automation has quickly become the unsung hero for pharmaceutical manufacturing. Through the crucial combination of safety and scalability – while meeting regulatory requirements – advanced automation systems and software work together to take a vaccine from small batches in a lab to large-scale global manufacturing. These technologies also help ensure consistent quality and fast production for quicker therapy release – all at a lower cost due to less manufacturing reviews and manual processes.
For example, Emerson’s electronic marshalling and plug and play technologies reduce time and costs related to equipment installation and connectivity, allowing new and expanded facilities to come online quicker. They also help securely integrate systems to ensure data integrity, enabling companies to electronically meet increasingly stringent regulatory reporting requirements.
Emerson is collaborating with many drug manufacturers around the world to adapt existing plants and lines to get medicines more quickly into patient hands. Through automation domain expertise, Emerson is helping companies write, test, install, validate and commission the automation software that makes it possible to safely speed vital medicine to market.
Beyond successes in helping pharmaceutical manufacturing, Emerson has made significant investments and acquisitions to extend across the complete product development lifecycle. These strategic moves have allowed Emerson to develop software that can seamlessly transfer to full-scale manufacturing; enhance modeling software for scheduling and capacity optimization; deliver advanced analytics to optimize equipment performance and eliminate production downtime; produce digital simulation software to train operators; and more.
COVID-19 technology needs don’t stop at manufacturing. After vaccines are produced at scale, they must be distributed – and this requires keeping them at a constant temperature as they travel across the global pharmaceutical cold chain, a temperature-controlled supply chain.
Through a robust portfolio of sensing technologies and advanced analytics, Emerson empowers companies to protect the integrity of treatments by helping them detect risks in transit or in storage — such as temperature swings, humidity, vibration, shock and even security threats.
Failure of temperature-control logistics costs the biopharmaceutical industry up to $35 billion per year. Having real-time data across the cold chain helps pharmaceutical manufacturers avoid these losses while meeting the expanding reporting requirements in a highly regulated industry.
There is a growing need for this type of technology, as the worldwide temperature-controlled pharmaceutical market continues to expand. In fact, each year, more than 300,000 sensors manufactured by Emerson help the global healthcare and pharmaceutical supply chain capture 8 billion data points, aiding in the delivery of medical goods and supplies for over 700 healthcare customers — including some of the largest hospitals in the world.
As we continue to apply the COVID-19 lessons of ingenuity and speed across the pharmaceutical industry, having the right technologies – and the right people to quickly implement them – is vital to quickly addressing global healthcare needs.
