Shipping of cryopreseved cell - (Mar/05/2009 )

I need to ship a lot of cryopreseved cell oversea. Any suggestion on how to ship the cells. This cell currently is store in liquide nitrogen. Is it a mus to ship it with liquid nitrogen? I afraid it will be dangerous to ship with liquid nitrogen.

kahsiong on Mar 5 2009, 10:35 AM said:

Shipping of cells is usually done in dry ice.
Contact any carrier (UPS/DHL/world carrier……) and they will do it.

kahsiong on Mar 5 2009, 09:35 AM said:

Have you concidered freezedrying them?

molgen on Mar 5 2009, 06:46 PM said:

Thanks for the reply. If ship in dry ice, I afraid the lost of cell viability, because all the way the cell is store in liquid nitrogen.

pito on Mar 8 2009, 02:51 AM said:

I didn't have any freeze dring machine here.

kahsiong on Mar 9 2009, 05:34 PM said:

Normally the cells are sent in dry-ice even if they are stored at liquid N2. This is a routine practice and I my-self have done it a lot of times without any appreciable loss of viability. Many institutes have a regular supply of dry-ice coming every day.

Dry ice will work just fine, unless Customs holds the package for a week

Contact a courier company and get them to tell you the IATA regulations for shipping. Basically, shipping in LN2 is not done by anyone as it is too dangerous from an explosion and/or suffocation point of view. Remember, handling of liquid nitrogen should only be done in an area with a larger volume than will be released by the volume you are handling (conversion is 1 litre of liquid will expand to 646 litres of gas) - would you want that on a plane?

As stated before, dry ice is fine for cells. After all you can store your cells at -80 deg C for quite some time before seeing a major loss of viability, and dry ice is at -78 ish

I have shipped cells to/from the UK to NZ (total flight time 30+ hours, not counting time in airports) on dry ice and they were fine for the 3-4 days transit. Make sure you get the courier company (I recommend World Couriers) to sort out the packaging so that you comply with IATA regulations, and to ensure that it is kept on dry ice and topped up in transit. Also make sure that they can pre-approve any import documents etc, so as to speed up time spent in customs.

kahsiong on Mar 10 2009, 03:04 AM said:

Freeze-drying = Lyophilization = removal of water from samples in the icy state under vacuum. Cells must be well dead after lyophilization.

eukaryotic cells will die during this process, but bacteria and yeast are quite happy with it.