In November 2013, the US Congress enacted the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) with a 10 year lead time in order to enforce assurance over pharmaceutical drug distribution from manufacturers all the way to dispensers. One critical requirement is the assurance that interactions happen exclusively between Authorized Trading Partners…

Since I plunged myself into the SSI world not too long ago, I’ve been both a learner within a new professional area and increasingly someone trying to explain what I do to others. Unsurprisingly, in both roles the challenge is more fun and rewarding when content is presented creatively with…

I care a lot about adult education because I’m a life-long learner. Having gone through a fair bit of academic, professional as well as continuous informal and unstructured learning, I have begun thinking about the topic from a wider angle. I have previously uttered some thoughts. …

It seems that after an initial frenzy at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when seemingly almost any old test could somehow make it on the market (check out the April news review for comments on quality issues), we’ve seen not just quality tests but also kits with added features…

The purpose of a vaccine is effectively to train the immune system in recognising and combatting the virus quickly should there ever be a real infection. To do so, vaccines deliver virus components, which are harmless on their own, to the recipient’s immune system. These components are referred to as…

Working across disciplines can be confusing, not only due to professional jargon but also due to basic terminology being used interchangeably by different people or media sources. This is very true in the biomedical sphere. After a recent brief exchange with someone who is interested in technology applications in healthcare…

Optimising supply chain management provides several tremendous use cases for blockchain applications. Below is a quick summary of two very informative blockchain discussions on supply chain transformation that provide some useful overviews across different industries and various aspects to ponder. Here are some of my highlights. What is the minimum viable tracking unit? This may seem…

COVID-19 has had a huge impact on various industries including manufacturing, travel & tourism as well as life sciences and healthcare. When we talk about ‘industries’, inevitably we talk about human lives. Let’s look beyond the immediate turmoil into which many have been thrust. …

Convalescent plasma (CP) therapy gained FDA emergency use authorisation (EUA) in August. It appears that this is surrounded by some controversy and suspicion of politicisation. Without getting anywhere near politics here, let’s not forget that health agencies’ interest in CP is nothing new. The FDA has previously encouraged survivors to…