Sean Conway

According to the Center for Disease Control, the Yellow Fever virus affects 200,000 individuals worldwide every year.  Outbreaks of this disease happen swiftly and unexpectedly, and they’ve become even more difficult to contain due to limitations of yellow fever vaccine supply.  Currently, demand outpaces supply for the yellow fever vaccine by 42%, and according to UNICEF, the vaccine’s price has increased by more than 500% since 2000.  Worldwide, there are only four World Health Organization qualified manufacturers, and only one distributor in the United States. The process for manufacturing yellow fever vaccine follows that of most other vaccines:  growth of a viral culture, harvesting, purification, formulation, filling, packaging, and quality assurance.

This project’s scope will primarily involve the formulation process for the yellow fever vaccine.  Once viral cultures have been grown, and harvested, they are placed into bottles for storage.  Next the bottles must be organized into groups called “lots”.  Each of these lots contains roughly 11 to 13 bottles and must meet minimum weight and potency standards.  With each bottle valued in the five-figure range, efficient lot formation has significant financial benefit.  It is this lot formation process that we address.

Prior to this project, grouping of bottles into lots was done manually.  However, this led to inventory underutilization and underproduction.  Through further investigation, it was possible to increase the number of lots using optimization.  Specifically, this project discusses the application of mixed integer linear programming to the lot formation process, as well as the financial and long-term inventory effects of using optimization instead of manual selection.

Sean Conway is a senior Industrial and Systems Engineering major in the Integrated Business and Engineering Honors program at Lehigh University.  Sean’s interests include optimization, software development, pharmaceutical supply chain management, and Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing.  He has recently completed two internships through the Lehigh co-op program with Sanofi Pasteur, a major pharmaceutical manufacturer in the Pocono area.  He has also completed an internship and IBE capstone project with Optamo, a Lehigh-founded software startup that improves the assignment of prisoners to state prisons.  Outside of the classroom, Sean is a lead tutor for the Center for Academic Success, and he is a TA for a healthcare-oriented IBE capstone project. He is planning to complete a master’s degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering in the 2020-2021 school year and will focus on optimization and operations research.