Delivering Hope Across Continents: A Direct-to-patient (DtP) Shipment for Rare Blood Cell Disorder Treatment

Delivering Hope Across Continents: A Direct-to-patient (DtP) Shipment for Rare Blood Cell Disorder Treatment

At NAF Pharma, our mission is to ensure that life-saving treatments reach patients safely, efficiently and effectively.

Shipping a strictly temperature-controlled (+2°C to +8°C) biologic product across the opposite side of the planet, from Hong Kong to São Paulo, a distance of more than 18,000 km, is far from straightforward. The medicine had to endure dramatically different climates at origin, at the transit hub, and at destination, while navigating Brazil’s notoriously complex customs and regulatory clearance procedures for imported medicines under the Named Patient framework.

Because of the extreme distance and the unavoidable time required for Brazilian pharmaceutical import clearance procedures, total door-to-door transit inevitably takes around 10 days. That is why maintaining +2°C to +8°C without deviation for the entire journey demands an exceptionally robust temperature-control solution.

For this shipment, the Intelsius ORCA™ high-performance packaging was the clear choice to safeguard the medicine from any temperature excursions across the 10-day journey. Combined with carefully planned complementary cold-chain measures, the ORCA demonstrated its ability to hibernate and extend its performance to maintain the required +2°C to +8°C range throughout, ensuring the product arrived in perfect condition and ready for immediate administration to the patient.

Additionally, through our proprietary platform we could follow the shipment in real time, both its exact GPS location and the live temperature inside the ORCA. Having that visibility gave us (and the patient’s medical team) full confidence that the medicine stayed perfectly within +2–8°C, even during the multi-day customs hold in Brazil.

A big thank you to our partners at Intelsius for your support and relentless innovation to make this possible. Together, we are redefining precision medicine and making a meaningful difference in patient care.

Let’s continue this vital journey, one life-saving shipment at a time.