Cold shipments

We can now offer you to ship your samples cold, rather than with dry ice, reducing your shipment costs. We showed that keeping samples cold assures accurate measurements of serum concentrations of biologics (PK) and their anti-drug-antibodies (ADA) (see figure 1 for stability data). For shipments that take less than 24 hours, you can send in frozen samples with an icepack for all monoclonal antibody biologics. Please, do contact us at [email protected] if you want to send us cold shipment samples as we need to assure we can directly unpack your shipment upon arrival.

Figure 1. Keeping serum samples spiked with 5 µg/mL of adalimumab at 4°C and 20°C (as depicted by blue and orange bars) does not affect recovery as compared to a frozen reference sample (black bar): recovery is no less than 80%. Storing at 37°C (in red bars) reduces the recovery to less than 80%. The bars depict an average of 3 to 6 independent measurements of  serum samples spiked with adalimumab and kept at a specific temperature for 1, 7, 14 or 21 days.

Etanercept and eculizumab
Please, for the biologics etanercept and eculizumab assure we receive the samples frozen. 

• Etanercept: this biologic deteriorates after prolonged exposure of samples to non-frozen conditions (see picture 2). 
• Eculizumab: To ensure a fair reflection of the in vivo situation regarding the equilibrium of eculizumab and its target C5, and prevent further complement activation, samples for eculizumab testing should be frozen directly after clotting and stored at -20˚C. 

Figure 2. Keeping serum samples spiked with 3 µg/mL of etanercept at 4°C, 20°C and 37°C (as depicted by blue, orange and red bars) affects recovery as compared to a frozen reference sample (black bar): recovery is less than 80%. The bars depict an average of 3-6 independent measurements of  serum samples spiked with etanercept and kept at a specific temperature for 1, 7, 14 or 21 days.