Combining cryostorage of cells and cell models with ambient shipping to advance biologistics for medical research: from cardiovascular disease to cancer

Current delivery of cells for drug discovery has severe drawbacks that prevent efficiency and market availability. Typically, cells are shipped cryopreserved within the UK and internationally. Maintaining the cells in a frozen state is one of the biggest challenges in cell transportation and requires the use of heavy, non-environmentally friendly dry ice packaging or liquid nitrogen. This limits the regions of supply and impacts time frames of delivery. Cells can thaw due to customs delays, making them unusable. Costs of dry ice have increased in the last year with recent fears of shortages and a high environmental costs of manufacture. These challenges together create a complex, uncertain, expensive process that is limited to specific regions of the world.

This project focuses on developing a product that will allow for cells and cell models to be stored long-term via cryopreservation as well as be shipped at room temperature, removing the need for ultra-cold transportation. The developed products ("CytoStor-Cryo" for cryotube formats and "WellReady-Cryo" for assay-ready formats) will remove the need for dry ice completely, reducing the costs of shipments, reducing the uncertainty associated with the availability of dry ice as a resource, increasing the geographical range of shipment, and eliminating the risk of cell thawing, death and product recall. This will allow companies to move away from making cells to order within a specific timeframe, and instead they can store cells long term and ship them out on demand. Reduced logistical cost, complexity, and failed shipments will be greatly beneficial to the UK's growing cell biosupply sector and will increase growth and profitability, thus having an overall positive effect on the economy. This will benefit drug discovery, biomedical research and healthcare by increasing the availability of cells/cell models and reducing reliance on animals. Integrating cryostorage with ambient transport will revolutionise cell biosupply.