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But before the specially made glass vials reach the needles that will deliver the vaccines to your immune systems, first they have to reach the country – and that often means making a long journey by plane, one that can be fraught for delicate vaccines which have to kept at a specific temperature or rendered useless.
The Pfizer vaccine, for instance, has to be kept at freezing temperatures, and can only be removed from that frigid environment a handful of times before it’s injected, or the precious doses become useless. That’s where SkyCell comes in. The Swiss company makes containers specifically designed for transporting vaccines by plane.
Cutting the risk of failure
Generally, before the pandemic, about 12% of vaccine doses suffered a failure during transport – SkyCell’s technology is able to bring that down to less than 0.1%. Traditionally, vaccines in transit are cooled by dry ice –but there’s a limit to how much of this can be used before it becomes dangerous to those handling the cargo. By improving energy transfer using a precision-engineered container, SkyCell has been able to mitigate against those limitations.
The SkyCell system also relies on packing each container full of sensors, which collect and process more than 750m data points – each container is able to maintain a steady temperature for more than 160 hours without any mechanical components. As well as temperature, the system tracks humidity, vibration and distance and time of travel, as well as the overall carbon emissions created by the journey.
That’s important for Covid, but also for the transport of other vaccines in future in a warming world. “We’ve found that the number of days where [one has to consider] temperature extremes has been going up,” SkyCell co-founder and CEO Richard Ettl told the online newspaper TechCrunch recently. “Last year, we had 30 days where it was warmer than 40°C across our network of countries.”
The big freeze
In December, SkyCell launched an ultra-cold smart container capable of storing vaccines at temperatures between -60°C and -80°C, cold enough for the Pfizer vaccine. “With the launch of this ultra-cold smart container, we are now able to transport all of the leading vaccine candidates for Covid-19, serving both the mass-volume 2°C to 8°C market and now the important market segment of -60°C to -80°C,” said Ettl.
The company has spent the past few months making hundreds of these containers for use around the world, with the aim of delivering 7m vaccine doses each month. As the world fights back against the pandemic, engineers are continuing to do their part.
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