Ephemeral Factories: A Supply Chain Model for Ultra-Short Shelf-Life Pharmaceuticals

 Traditional pharmaceutical production relies on centralized manufacturing and complex cold-chain logistics to manage moderate shelf-life constraints. This model fails for a new theoretical class of "ephemeral" therapies—for example, personalized cancer vaccines composed of live, modified patient cells—that have a viable therapeutic window of only 6 to 18 hours. This article proposes the "Ephemeral Factory" model, a radical alternative where the point-of-production and point-of-care become a single, unified node located within a hospital. We analyze the collapse of the traditional supply chain functions of Plan, Source, Make, and Deliver into a continuous, zero-latency process. The abstract details a new production scheduling algorithm, the "Protocol-Driven Interval Timer," which sequences the manufacturing steps backwards from the confirmed time of patient administration, rather than forwards from a work order release. The critical innovation is a quality assurance framework based entirely on in-process parametric release, eliminating sterility and potency tests that require multi-day cultures. We demonstrate that the primary production bottleneck shifts from equipment throughput to the cognitive load on highly skilled operators managing a non-stoppable, safety-critical process with no buffer inventory.