Non-Technical Update...and We're Goin' Pickin'!

As Kelly mentioned, the technical team has laid out a great plan for the semester.  On the non-technical side, we've identified a few appropriate peer-reviewed journals to shoot for down the line.  Our focus moving forward will be to continue gathering more information on the nature of the cold chain.  A big question came up in our meeting with Dr. Shah this week: where is it appropriate to assume that a person will be around to check on the vaccines?  If we put in a sensor that has some kind of alarm go off, will someone be around to take the appropriate action?  Or will our PCM box sit in the middle of an airport or in a cold room unattended, allowing the vaccines to overheat/freeze?  These are the questions we'll have to consider.

The non-technical side has also started to explore all the different markets that use the cold chain.  A few we stumbled upon  were food, blood, and a whole lot of pharmaceutical products.  


Here is a startling statistic:
Based on a recent study conducted by PharmaCommerce, seven of the ten top global pharmaceutical products in 2014 will require cold-chain handling.

(You can read the full press release here.  I emailed the folks at PharmaCommerce to see if we can get a hand on the report: "Cold Chain Biopharma Logistics Sourcebook 2010")

In the next week, the team plans to gather more information on pricing of sensors, continue preparing for the ice box experiment, and research more existing cold chain technologies. And to top it all, we finally set a date for our team social: Friday, October 22nd!  We are tentatively going apple-picking (maybe pumpkin-picking would be more appropriate?)  No matter what we do, it should be a really good time!  


-Veena