Sabotaging Pharmaceutical Transport?

It sounds plausible, except you'd definitely have to check on what happens to the drug in question upon how much exposure to heat, etc.

My dad's management consultancy does medical devices and one venture into pharmaceuticals. The vast majority of QC goes on in the manufacturing (and tests for storage/usage), but I'll make sure to ask him about transport specifically.

(Clearly, there has to be some QC about refrigeration, etc, but I suspect you may have hit on something there.)

Question: do you mean hijacked by a stranger? How do you get around the employees telling what happened? Or is this something where it could be an inside job, where the drivers are trusted?

Since the refrigerated drugs would probably only be a partial load, they would be loaded into the nose (front) of the trailer, then an insulated barrier placed across the trailer and the unrefrigerated freight loaded. There may be a side door for access to the nose of the trailer. Refrigerated freight is packed as tightly as possible, and because all that weight is in the nose, can result in the axles of the tractor being technically overloaded, even though the overall weight of the trailer is legal.

Frozen freight is fairly easy to see if there has been a thaw/refreeze cycle. Refrigerated freight can be harder to tell. For high value refrigerated freight, most modern companies have a broadcaster that reports the condition of the thermo-unit and the temperature of the freight. When you have several hundred thousand dollars worth of freight in a railcar or truck trailer, this is cheap technology.

Transport times are usually well known for regular shipments such as this one would be. The person unloading should check the load date versus when it arrives. A big difference would be investigated further. Immediately checked would be the status of the thermo-unit. Just like with your car, you can plug in a device that tells what the unit has been doing.

I would see this as more likely to involve the driver who shuts off the unit a mile or so down the road, then turns it on later, but runs a normal trip time. Depending upon the length of the trip, and the time value of its transport, you could have either one or two drivers (two drivers can run nearly a full 24 hours in one day).

It's been many years since I dealt with refrigerated freight, but there was discussion of strips to indicate whether the freight had dipped above or below the temperature range. I'm assuming that would now be available, but I don't know.

And the more temperature sensitive the drugs are, the more controls you're going to put on it. Fruits and vegetables have been shipped from California to New York for over a century now, and meat a little less. It has been thrown onto railcars and trucks. It has minimal supervision during the trip. And a bad load of strawberries is a six figure loss. With food products you can tell. My guess is refrigerated drugs would have some sort of quality control check.

By the way, the shipping company wants to be able to prove that the trailer or railcar worked. It is not unknown for a warehouse in California to ship a bad load of fruits and vegetables, seal the trailer or railcar, then try to blame the shipping company. Since no one checks the inside of these units, it's very easy to do.

I think you'd have to fake the temperature record on the trailer to make this work.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

You might try googling pharmaceutical transport- there's a lot of info about it on the web. Even FedEx services that market! There's variety in dry-ice/gel pac shipping containers (boxes that could use ordinary means of travel but still stay cold) as well as sensors to insure that the package remained in the desired temperature range during transit. There's even a wikipedia article on cold chain as the process is called.

kwils said:

There's variety in dry-ice/gel pac shipping containers (boxes that could use ordinary means of travel but still stay cold) as well as sensors to insure that the package remained in the desired temperature range during transit.

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Was going to say this. I don't work in pharmaceuticals, but in a lab that tests vaccine sample. We only do transport of small amounts by car now and then, but it's a similar principle. We put an electronic sensor in a foam box filled with dry ice, drive over to the storage facility, put the sample into the box, and drive back. The sensor's data is later examined to make sure the temperature remained within the acceptable range.

For your story, a particularly devious method might be to cut off refrigeration in the truck (or whatever is being used to transport the drug) but place the sensor in a vat of ice, or something that is at the correct temperature. Then, turn the refrigeration back on (after the drug has been warmed/rendered ineffective), remove the sensor from the ice/cold-pack/whatever, and slink away as if nothing ever happened. That way, anybody inspecting the sensor's data will see nothing out of the ordinary, and they'll be scratching their heads as to why the drug doesn't work.

This is assuming that the sensor is a small unit that can be cooled with an ice pack or or something.

Y'all are quick! Yep, I can't add anything new after talking to Dad.

I like JayMan's idea of faking out the sensors one way or another.

Wise move doing it during transportation: I used to work at a pharmaceutical company who made pretty serious drugs that are sought after on the black market and the walls of the storage area were more secure than a prison. I never knew much about the transportation I'm afraid, but it would have to be a weaker link than the storage facility at either end.

lac582 said:

Anyone familiar with how drugs are moved from the facilities where they are produced to the warehouses for distribution? My character needs to render a drug ineffective, but have it go undetected.

This is a drug that requires refrigeration, so I'm thinking perhaps they can hijack the refrigerated truck, turn off the refrigeration for a few hours and expose the containers to heat, then turn the refrigeration back on so it's cooled down again by the time it reaches its destination.

Does that seem plausible? What sort of quality assurance procedures might they have to bypass?

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If it's critical, there will be temperature sensors in each box or on each bottle that change color permanently when they go outside the temp limits. These are installed when the bottles/boxes are filled.

You could have the character frantically replacing all the sensors

Question...

What does the drug do?

Now, say you succeed, what are the consequences if the tampering is not noticed? Thousands of deaths or illnesses?