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LOGISTICS & DISTRIBUTION
AN INSIDE LOOK
at World Courier Sam Herbert President, World Courier
The complexity of drug development is not to be contested. From discovering a molecule; moving from pre-clinical to clinical testing; gaining regulatory approval, pharma companies invest so much resources and time into developing cures and therapies which are ultimately unlikely to make it to market.
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ut while we may all have an idea of the scale of the pharma market, the area of logistics often goes unsung for the role it plays in delivering much needed medicines around the world. On the back of sector leader World Courier’s 50th anniversary, European Pharmaceutical Manufacturer editor Reece Armstrong sat down with president Sam Herbert to discuss the complexity of the pharma supply
chain and the role the company has played on the industry’s world stage. Founded in New York in 1969 by Jim Berger, World Courier soon developed a global network that helped it move products quickly and efficiently around the world. In the 1980s, the company was approached by pharma companies working on infectious disease trials.
“It was at a time when clinical trials were looking more globally and looking to do more of the testing in central laboratories,” Herbert explains. At that point, no one was moving infectious samples around the globe, so it came down to World Courier to learn. The company moved most of its products on commercial airlines, petitioning them to move infectious samples largely destined for HIV and AIDS-based trials. Since then, the company has moved into investigational products, set up in-country clinical trial depots and established offices in over 50 countries. For Herbert, who joined in 2013 one year after the company was acquired by AmerisourceBergen, it makes sense that World Courier’s ‘value proposition is that flexibility and that adaptability’, he tells me. Herbert gives the example of the emergence of cell and gene therapies, treatments which bring about a whole new set of challenges in how they’re transported. “People talk about these as the third wave of innovation, from small molecules to big molecules, to now these personalised