SA natural gas and helium producer Renergen will start
production of its helium-powered ultra-cold mobile freezer in the next few days
and has started discussions to sell the units to logistics companies.
Companies and governments around the world are working on
ways to establish cold-chain storage and delivery systems for vaccines such as
the Pfizer Inc and BioNTech shot, which must be shipped and stored at
ultra-cold temperatures and can only last at standard fridge temperatures for
up to five days.
As a solution, Renergen on Monday launched its prototype
cold-chain storage called Cryo-Vacc, which has a temperature range of -150°C to
8°C and can store vaccines for periods of up to 30 days without the need for
any power supply.
“We’ve already started to take orders for this product. So
we’re ready to start going into production in the next few days,” Renergen CEO
Stefano Marani told journalists at the demo-launch event.
The company has partnered with local distributor DPD Laser,
jointly owned, and controlled by The Laser Group and European DPDgroup, which
will buy the units from Renergen and then rent them out to its health-care
warehousing and logistics clients in SA and the Sadc.
Marani said the company had also received multiple
expressions of interests and order requests from all over the world.
Cryo-Vacc uses liquid helium to transport by air, and liquid
nitrogen to transport by road. Current cold-chain solutions use dry ice —
frozen carbon dioxide — or cold plates, but this has not been sustainable for
SA said DPD Laser CEO Anton Visagie.
“Our biggest challenges; we’ve got very high ambient
temperatures in SA, we’ve got long distances to travel and often when you get
to the point of vaccination there is a lack of infrastructure. There could be
load-shedding,” he said referring to frequent scheduled power cuts.
Another difficulty with vaccine transport is that aircraft
can only carry a limited amount of dry ice as it turns into gas over time,
displacing the breathable air in the cabin.
Earlier this month the health ministry called for bids from
service providers to import, store and distribute Covid-19 vaccines at
different required temperatures.
SA has yet to launch its COVID-19 vaccination programme and
the government has decided to go with the Johnson & Johnson’s dose after
trial results this month showed AstraZeneca’s two-shot vaccine was less
effective against the new variant of the coronavirus dominating SA infections.
