Imagine this: a biologic leaves a manufacturing site in the Dominican Republic destined for a patient in Frankfurt. It passes through a freight forwarder, a cargo terminal, an airline, a connecting hub, and a ground handler — each a different company, each with its own processes.
Every single point must be right, because if the cold chain breaks at any point, the shipment is lost, the cost runs into tens of thousands of dollars, and a patient goes without a treatment that could be keeping them alive.
This is the central challenge of pharmaceutical air cargo today. Biologics, reagents, and cell and gene therapies represent a growing share of what moves by air, and while their physical weight may be declining, their value density is rising sharply, narrowing the margin for error at every step of the journey.
At the same time, sourcing patterns are shifting. Traditional pharmaceutical routes through Asia are giving way to emerging corridors through Europe and Latin America, as companies respond to tariff pressures and look to diversify supply chain risk.
In practice, this means the complexity of moving pharmaceuticals is only increasing, and no single organization can manage it alone.
That reality was at the heart of discussions at the 2026 IATA World Cargo Symposium, where leaders from across airlines, logistics providers, freight forwarders, and cargo operations came together to examine what a coordinated approach to pharmaceutical air cargo looks like, and what it takes to make it work.
Pharmaceutical shipments demand an exceptional level of care and attention. Sophisticated packaging, passive and active cooling, and real-time temperature monitoring are baseline requirements. Any temperature excursion at any point in the journey can render a consignment non-compliant, regardless of how well the other steps were handled.
As the sector shifts toward higher-value, more specialized medications, that pressure intensifies. Maarten Wormer, Head of Consulting at AEVEAN, put it plainly at WCS 2026: "The increasing value density of pharmaceuticals emphasizes compliance and monitoring throughout the cool chain, from factory to patient, including measuring time out of range and excursion events."
Meeting that standard requires every party in the chain to perform consistently. The airline controls its aircraft and cargo facilities. The freight forwarder manages booking and documentation. The ground handler owns the tarmac and the cold room. No single operator sees the full picture, but regulatory compliance demands unbroken, end-to-end integrity.
The gap between what individual operators can achieve and what pharma integrity highlights why collaboration is essential.
As Anne Dunne, General Manager Cargo at Air New Zealand, emphasized at this year’s conference, "The entire supply chain needs to work together to make sure the flow is optimal from start to finish, balancing investment across the supply chain to avoid both underinvestment and overinvestment." Strengthening one link will not improve outcomes; it will only shift where the failure occurs.
From the logistics side, Panayotis Lazalde, Managing Director Peru at DHL Express, reinforced what genuine collaboration looks like in practice: "Creating frameworks from a GDP perspective and having solid contingency plans is where we can offer a sustainable, reliable solution for pharma shipments."
And Ludwig Hausmann of McKinsey & Company pointed to where competitive advantage ultimately lies: "Trust in pharma will be won by companies that listen to their customers, innovate services and products, and control handovers with real-time visibility."
That trust is not built once. It is earned at every handoff.
So how does the industry move from good intentions to a genuinely coordinated system? That is where IATA's certification programs come in. By establishing a common standard that airlines, freight forwarders, and ground handlers can train to, audit against, and demonstrate to customers, certification creates a shared language across the stakeholder ecosystem, serving as a foundation for the coordinated performance pharma demands.
But individual certification, while essential, is only part of the answer. The next step is a community approach that treats the airport ecosystem as the meaningful unit of measurement. Rather than each operator pursuing compliance in isolation, airlines, ground handlers, and freight forwarders at a given gateway work together toward shared standards. That is the level of systemic, network-wide reliability that pharma supply chains actually require.
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