Future prices of Dry Ice?

[LCoop]

I have heard and read that one vaccine that's close to being released requires deep cold for storage and transport. They said it would require dry ice for transporting. SO that got me to wondering what will happen to the dry ice availability or price. Thoughts

 

[Cushing H.]

This is called "cold chain" .... as in maintaining the cold conditions for a drug from the point of manufacture all the way to the patient. Doing this for all the doses to get everyone a shot is going to be ab absolute bear .... the likes of which I think it is fair to say has never been done in the history of the pharma industry.

Dry ice for shipping is considered to be a hazardous substance .... and so shippers are going to want to at least try to stay away from it. There are a number of non-dry ice options for mainting cold chain in shipping .... and these are re-useable - so they will want to try to use those options instead of dry ice. The question is whether there will be enough of those other cold systems available for the massive amount of movemement needed is the question. If the people planning the logistics of this are doing their job right, they should have been planning on having those shipping materials available starting six months ago....... Dry ice is also perishable once it is made ..... so another reason for staying away from it.

so .... just as a guess, there might be somewhat of a shortage, but I would be surprised (famous last words....) if it is totally unavaiable......

(Background - I have been in charge of transportation logisitics for several pharma clinical trials ..... two of which included this "cold chain" need in transportation, including trans-atlantic transport and getting things in through customs (which has its own set of challenges.....). I have also been a member of an industry working group defining best practices in cold chain activity. it is a challenge, but definitly doable.)

Just my guesswork, FWIW....

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

Dry ice is made by refracting air and compressing the CO2 gas. Last I checked, there is no shortage of air.
Like the above answer, it may make a distribution issue and the suppliers may need to increase production, but I doubt it will be like the great toilet paper shortage.

 

[Cushing H.]

So .... I partially take back what I wrote above. Just saw a report on this .... and it looks like they ARE planning on shipping on dry ice. Developing insulated boxes to put the dry ice into. UPS is being contracted to do the long haul, and Dr. offices will also be supplied with these insulated boxes. Ordinarily, no pharma company in their right mind would create/market a drug formulation that requires this kind of storage --- as if the cold conditions are not demonstrated as literally continuous, then the entire drug contents of any box that looses dry ice content becomes trash. just not doable and still make a profit on the stuff. but this is an emergency... and it looks like they are going to try to make this work.

I just heard an interview with the person responsible for all these transportation logistics ..... and while she said they had the production in-hand for these insulated boxes, and had things ready to go with UPS for long-haul shipments and local deliveries, she did NOT have a really good answer for questions about the supply of dry ice (and that there are now local shortages of it).

Stacy - you are right ..... air is plentiful .... but the type of industrial equipment to extract CO2/dry ice from that air is BIG capital infrastructure that takes years to build and start up .... so the supply might well be diverted to the vaccine distribution, and thus limited for other purposes. my response above was presupposing the use of other cold chain shipping technologies ..... but it looks like for this "first out of the blocks" vaccine they are going to rely on dry ice. It is extremely likely though that vaccines that are approved later (there are quite a few being developed) will be more stable at higher temperatures (like maybe just basic refrigeration that everyone has capability of), and so the crunch on dry ice will not be an ongoing thing.

If I were planning this, I would accept this difficult-to-store vaccine as an initial way to get hospital staff and first responders vaccinated starting around the end of the year, and then shift to a more stable, easier to distribute, vaccine for general population use starting maybe in the spring.....

 

[LCoop]

I've read this particular vaccine takes TWO shots. So twice as much cold transport. I'm pretty sure it takes a little more than just air to make dry ice. Expensive equipment that no one is ready to invest in IF this is just a short term vaccine with no long term pay back. Just saying. Hope I'm wrong.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

I was thinking about this last night and what I recall from my days at Virginia Chemicals was that CO2 is actually a nearly free by-product of oil and gas refineries and the chemical industry. I did some searches and found this site on CO2 production plants. There is some interesting stuff here for some of us nerds:
http://www.comtecswiss.com/en/equipment-and-plants/co2-production-plant/

 

[Britt_Askew]

The pfizer vaccine is the only one that will need that temp. He said he expects there to be several other vaccine options real soon that wont need that temp.