The 5 Steps of Preparing Our Shippers for Transit
Clean and validated cryogenic packing is essential to compliantly ship biological material for the animal health industry. But how can you be sure that your supply chain management partner understands the importance of cleanliness in standardized shipping practices? Without preparing shippers for transit with the proper cleaning protocols and industry-compliant solutions, your materials could be put at risk.
To maintain the integrity of your biological material throughout every step of the shipping process, Cryoport Systems has developed a shipper requalification process that sets the industry standard for compliant shipping. Here’s a breakdown of how we requalify every shipper for its impending transit to maintain material integrity.
1. Cleaning
Cryoport Systems’ signature Cryoport Express® dry vapor shippers are the most advanced storage and shipping containers on the market today and can maintain the cryogenic temperatures needed to safely ship animal biological materials. Our shippers and stainless-steel accessories are reusable, eco-friendly, and our requalification process ensures that each shipper maintains its full integrity during every shipment.
Before any of our shippers are packed with animal biological material, they undergo our Veri-Clean® process, the industry’s first and only validated cleaning and disinfection procedure. We developed Veri-Clean® to virtually eliminate the risk of cross-contamination between shipments. With support from a third-party accredited laboratory, Veri-Clean’s® disinfectant and cleaning procedure prepares each shipper to safely house your materials by:
- Reducing external contaminants by 99.9999%.
- Eliminating any trace of environmental flora such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses.
- Manually confirming the shipper is free from protein and hemoglobin.
Veri-Clean® is the only process in the industry that upholds ISO 21973, the regulatory guidance for the safe transportation of biological materials. With this assurance, you know that our shippers pose virtually no threat of contamination to your materials.
2. Thermal Performance Verification
Next, Cryoport Systems confirms the thermal performance of each shipper to ensure that the Nitrogen Evaporation Rate (NER) and liquid nitrogen levels will support your logistics requirements. We use the dry vapor of liquid nitrogen to power our shippers. The use of liquid nitrogen is what maintains the required cryogenic temperatures for the transportation of biological materials. We verify the amount of dry vapor that each shipper can hold prior to every shipment, and we track its capacity and thermal performance during every shipment over the lifetime of each shipper. By confirming the thermal performance of each shipper, we can ensure that our fleet remains in top-performing order.
3. Stocking
Many cold chain transport companies are unable to provide exact hold times for their cryogenic shippers, potentially risking the validity and effectiveness of the sensitive material inside. However, Cryoport Systems’ stocking process ensures that each of our shippers can maintain the intended, or estimated, shipping duration. This standardization of each unit’s hold time mitigates risk to your animal biological materials and is standard across all of our fleets.
It’s vital that each shipper can maintain a minimum hold time to account for the safety of your materials if the transit time of the shipper is extended due to logistical reasons outside of our control.
4. Charging and Staging
Once the thermal performance of the shipper has been verified, our units are almost ready for your reproductive materials. First, each shipper is fully charged with liquid nitrogen. The shipper is set aside to absorb the liquid nitrogen, and any remaining liquid is emptied from the shipper. This charging process is a vital step as it ensures our shippers maintain cryogenic temperatures while staying complaint with the International Air Transportation Association (IATA). IATA compliance allows our shippers to be transported via aircraft both domestically and internationally.
5. Shipping
Before our shippers can be sent to their receiving destination, our team takes great care to make sure it leaves our facility with the proper documentation. We assemble all the components and order materials into a BOM, or a bill of material. A BOM clearly states:
- Handling instructions for your clinical professionals.
- Any loading and unloading instructions.
- Client-specific order details.
With this information, we help ensure that your materials will be both packaged in the correct shipper and handled compliantly during both the loading and unloading process. This final step completes the requalification process and deems a shipper ready to receive your animal biological material from where it’s stored.
These steps in our requalification process ensure that our shippers are uniquely prepared to maintain the integrity of your animal biological materials no matter the shipping destination. For more information on our shipping services, contact us on our website.