A freight integrator hopes it has a solution to a $35 billion problem in the fast-growing business of exporting and importing temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals – waste caused by lack of temperature control from manufacture to end use.
Frontier Scientific Solutions last month began flying between Ireland, where nine of the world’s 10 largest and better-known pharmaceutical and generic brands are manufactured, and North Carolina’s Wilmington International Airport, where it has built a 530,000-square-foot warehouse built for the nation’s first “scheduled service” flights for the life-science industry.
Backed by $1.5 billion investment from GID, Frontier is called a freight integrator because it is leasing the wide-body jets from ATSG, temperature-controlled 767 wide-body aircraft that it will use exclusively for steroids, vaccines, hormones, blood plasma, a wide range of pharmaceuticals that now includes GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Trulicity, and “active pharmaceutical ingredients,” or APIs.
Imports of GLP-1 drugs, which mimic a natural hormone, have skyrocketed this year with their use as weight-loss drugs in addition to their initial use as treatments for diabetes. Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport has been a prime beneficiary of the rapid growth in not only GLP-1 drugs but also medicines in individual dosages and the category of vaccines, plasma and other blood fractions.
Solving the $35 billion problem is not just about the flights and the sensors used to track temperature stability. In addition, Frontier created a foreign trade zone at the coastal North Carolina airport to bookend with the one associated with Shannon International Airport on Ireland’s west coast.
Augmenting the traditional benefit of trade zones – no tariffs paid until the imports leave the FTZ and “enter the commerce of the United States – the zone offers the potential to smooth the Customs clearance process and allow for better timing as tariff rates fluctuate.
The United States is, given the size of its economy, a large import market. The United States imported more than $225 billion in just three categories in 2024: medicines in individual doses (HS 3003); vaccines, plasma and other blood fractions (HS 3002); and insulin, hormones and steroids (HS 2937). It also has a sizeable export market as well.
Most of these imports now arrive on passenger flights, what is called “belly cargo” in the industry, as opposed to freighters, or aircraft that have no passengers. What Frontier is offering sits between the two, offering scheduled service without co-mingling its customers’ cargo with luggage which can lead to inadvertent damage, and freighter service, which can be delayed based on space availability.
“The introduction of a life-sciences-compliant air corridor changes that dynamic,” said Frontier’s president of transportation, Leandro Moreira. Leandro and I have known each other for more than two decades and he purchased limited merchandise trade data from my company on one occasion prior to joining Frontier.
Ireland caught the attention of President Trump early in his second term as one of his initial “Dirty 15” because of the size of the U.S. trade deficit with the European nation, much of it tied to the life-science industry. Those deficits have been the foundation of his trade war with Ireland and the rest of the world, largely relying on IEEPA tariffs, the constitutionality of which will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow.
The goal of the effort by Frontier Scientific Solutions, which will have three weekly flights each way, is to limit what are often preventable “temperature excursions,” when the shipment exceeds limits set for safe use; to mitigate expiration-date issues related to flight or other supply-chain delays; and to eliminate incidents resulting from co-mingling with other imports or exports that might not require the same sensitivity in handling.
“Industry data indicates that roughly 60 percent of temperature excursions occur during airport ground handling, particularly when shipments are staged on the tarmac before loading or after arrival,” Moreira said.
To that end, Frontier Science Solutions is attempting to solve a $35 billion waste problem that can’t easily or reliably be solved by conventional “belly cargo” flights, the industry’s greatest single point of failure: ground handling.
