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Always Cola, Rarely Essential Medicines

21 March 2011 By Leave a Comment

Always Coke Rarely Essential Medicines

Last week we received and email from one of our Virtual Advisory Board members, Prashant Yadav, drawing our attention to a paper just published by INSEAD and co-authored by Prashant YADAV, Orla STAPLETON and Luk N. VAN WASSENHOVE. The paper is entitled: Always Cola, Rarely Essential Medicines: Comparing Medicine and Consumer Product Supply Chains in the Developing World.

A year or so ago we came across an early draft of this paper and this led us to contact Prashant who has been a source of energy and encouragement ever since. We are particularly pleased with the concluding paragraphs reproduced below – the emboldening is mine:

Interestingly, many new initiatives have begun that are attempting to replicate some of the key success factors observed in the consumer product supply chains. For instance, Village Reach is an innovative model to deliver vaccines and drugs in Mozambique that circumvents the asset specificity problem in medicine distribution through creative bundling with other products. The Affordable Medicines Facility for Malaria is a pilot project to understand how points-of-sale and the breadth of the distribution channel can be expanded for anti-malaria medication (Laxminarayan and Gelband 2009) to achieve efficiencies without compromising quality or traceability. The ACT Watch project is a multi-year multi-country study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to use a third party to gather market data for anti-malarial medicines. The government of Tanzania has started a very successful Accredited Drug Dispensing Outlet (ADDO) program to increase the retail points of dispensing essential drugs. Similar initiatives are underway in Zambia and Ghana. A new project called ColaLife is trying to utilize the secondary distribution channels of Coca-Cola in developing countries to carry ‘social products’, such as oral rehydration salts to save children’s lives.

We remain very excited about how the multidisciplinary nature of technical expertise being made available to the field of global health through individual commitment, private philanthropy and government receptiveness is promoting innovations that can mimic the effectiveness and efficiency of soft drink supply chains while preserving the safety and traceability that are vital to medicine supply chains.

Related post: How Coca-Cola’s distribution system works

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Reports Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How do we get the attention of Melinda Gates?

21 September 2010 By 2 Comments

Today, Melinda Gates spoke at TEDxChange and marvelled at the way Coca-Cola gets to remote areas of developing countries while vaccines and condoms do not!

Take a look at this video – her talk starts about 24 minutes in (drag the play cursor and wait). The Twittersphere did its best to bring ColaLife to her attention but somehow we need to do more – how do we bring ColaLife to Melinda’s attention? Can anyone help?

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign Tagged With: , , , , ,

Vaccines in AidPods by 2015?

20 February 2010 By Leave a Comment


This video is the copyright of Oxford University 2010 and first appeared here on 18 Feb 2010.

This is very exciting. Watch the video to get the full story. Basically, a team at the Jenner Institute have come up with a way to store the active ingredients of a vaccine on a small square membrane which does not need to be stored in a fridge. Traditionally, vaccines need to be refrigerated from the time they are produced to the moment they are injected. This causes huge logistical problems as the whole of the distribution system needs to be kept cold. In practice this means that thousands and thousands of children do not get the vaccines they need.

At the moment the ColaLife idea can do nothing to address this problem because the AidPods would be exposed to the elements and could get very hot. So AidPods could not be used to distribute traditional vaccines. But they could be used to distribute these new ‘heat-stable vaccines’. In the video Dr Matt Jennings claims that vaccines produced in this way are stable for 6 months at temperatures of 45°C which is incredible.

‘Currently vaccines need to be stored in a fridge or freezer,’ explains lead author Dr Matt Cottingham of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford. ‘That means you need a clinic with a nurse, a fridge and an electricity supply, and refrigeration lorries for distribution.

‘If you could ship vaccines at normal temperatures, you would greatly reduce cost and hugely improve access to vaccines,’ he says. ‘You could even picture someone with a backpack taking vaccine doses on a bike into remote villages.’

‘We’ve shown that a very simple way of heat-stabilising vaccines works for two viruses that are being used as the basis for novel vaccines in development,’ says principal investigator Professor Adrian Hill of Oxford University. ‘This is so exciting scientifically because these viruses are fragile. If we are able to stabilise these, other vaccines are likely to be easier.’

They are now looking to put a commercial strategy in place for the development of the technology.

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Videos Tagged With: , , , ,