Q&A: The Importance of Cooling Technology for Prescription Drugs

From EpiPens and insulin to GLP-1s and the COVID-19 vaccine, many are unaware of the major role refrigeration plays in the moving and storing of prescription drugs and pharmaceutical products. While most businesses use compressor-based refrigeration technology to store their prescriptions, Phononic—a technology company revolutionizing the way products are heated and cooled—has stood out in the industry with its solid state cooling technology.

Dana Krug, Senior Vice President of Cold Chain Fulfillment at Phononic, sat down with Drug Topics to discuss the importance of cooling refrigeration for pharmaceutical products patients use every day. He also explained how Phononic’s disruptive but effective technology is shaking up the industry and helping pharmacies maximize their profits.

Krug explained how Phononic’s disruptive but effective technology is shaking up the industry and helping pharmacies maximize their profits. | image credit: Unic / stock.adobe.com

In part 1 of his interview with Drug Topics, Krug gave an overview of Phononic and how his company is revolutionizing the industry amidst global warming and rising heat levels.

Drug Topics: What are some examples of pharmaceutical products or medications that rely on certain types of cooling technology?

Dana Krug: Any of the GLP ones, so any of the weight loss drugs; that's where we're really seeing the explosion. From prescriptions being fulfilled, we're seeing that's where the doubling of the need for cooling is coming in. But you're also seeing it, and it's been there for a long time, for things like insulin. Any protein-based vaccines would require cooling. Things that most people wouldn't actually think about that need controlledtemperatures are things like birth control, EpiPens. They may not need what people would think of as refrigeration, so it's more like 55-75 [degrees] Fahrenheit, but they still need [to be] controlled. You can't have them sitting in a 120-degree warehouse without having the control from that perspective. You can go down even colder, more into freezing temperatures like a minus 20, and that's where you'll start getting into more vaccines for chickenpox or singles. You'll see that kind of a need. Those are probably the more common.

Then you start getting into ultra-cold, which is not something that Phononic does, but that's when you start getting into things like the Pfizer vaccine for COVID-19, where they needed to actually see minus 80, or minus 61. It’s ultra cold; it's not an area that we play in. But the majority of cooling really is more that 2-8 [degrees Celsius], which is more like 36-44 if you convert it over; I would say the majority is sitting there. But like I said, you do actually need cooling, or at least temperature control, in a lot of different other areas that are very common to most people.

Drug Topics: How would you explain the importance of keeping certain prescriptions cool during the rising heat of the summer months, as well as with the increase in global warming the past few decades?

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Dana Krug: When you talk about global warming, I think it's important to note that our solutions actually will help with mitigating global warming. Our refrigerant that we use in all of our products is water and CO2. So, our global warming potential is actually less than one, versus what you would see in a compressor-based system or even dry ice. But compressor-based systems, the refrigerants can be upwards of 1000 global warming potential. So, you can kind of see the drastic difference between what we're producing and using to cool versus what traditional systems are out there. I believe that the target average was trying to get that down to about 700 global warming potential, but again, we're sitting at less than one.

[It’s] similar to what we're talking about as far as in the factories. You’ve got to maintain cold chain from the point in time that you move the drug from any refrigeration system, and you start going into packaging. Moving it through the warehouse is one area and a little bit easier to maintain, but there's still issues that you run into. In the summer months, even in the factories, you do have to worry about heat in some of these factories, especially when you start going up 30-40 feet in the factory, if they’re storing at that level. Air-conditioning systems aren't made to be able to very uniformly cool inside of a factory. You want to make sure that you're maintaining temperature of each drug at the right temperature. The way our totes work I can set the set point specifically for a specific drug if I want to maintain it.

Once you start getting outside more into the summer months, what you're seeing is temperatures that are, you know, go to Arizona and you can hit 120. Putting product in the back of a van that is reaching 120-130 degrees starts to degrade most products that are out there that need to be cold. The problem that you run into a lot of the time with what they're doing today is more passive cooling: it’s interlacing dry ice in or gel packs in. The problem with that is those are all time-based. If I'm in traffic, if I have a delay in my delivery, then all of my product will actually start going out of spec. And the problem with that also is there's no monitoring that happens in each one of those packages, so the driver’s not going to know that there was a temperature excursion on product that's in the back of their van that's being delivered. And in the summer months, you can start the day off at 60 degrees and end up at 100, and you have to have something that can work within that range and be able to tell the driver or somebody when there's a problem that's going to occur, not that it's already occurred.

The way that we look at our system in our totes is it's an active cooling solution. The reason why we say it's an active cooling solution is because we're trying to not only cool, but if something does happen, we want to notify the customer in advance of actual degradation of their product so that they can act on that information and either remove the product if they had to, or move it to a different tote if they had to. It's really aboutproactively monitoring all of your drugs as they're transporting from the point in time that they go into the warehouse to the point in time that they get to the curbside at the customer. [It’s also] making sure that you can accurately state and document the delivery of that drug at the right temperature.

Phononic is the only company to date that I'm aware of that has the ability to take the changes that we've made in legacy solid state cooling.and deliver freezing temperatures using that technology and have commercially deployed it. But it's not actively used throughout the industry. You're still seeing a lot of passive cooling with gel packs, with ice packs, with dry ice. Or you're seeing refrigeration trucks that are having to be used, or dry ice, which gets very expensive, and again, you're just not monitoring what's happening.

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