Cold-Chain Shipping for Recombinant Proteins: What Actually Happens in Transit

What is actually temperature-sensitive, which documents customs will ask for, and how to avoid the two failures that waste a shipment.

Lyophilised versus frozen

Freeze-dried powder is comparatively forgiving and short international transit at ambient temperature is usually acceptable. The genuinely temperature-sensitive stage arrives after reconstitution — which is why aliquoting and single-use freezing matter more than the flight itself.

What documentation you will be asked for

Commercial invoice, packing list, batch CoA and MSDS. Institutional procurement and customs will both ask, and one missing document can hold a shipment at the border long enough to compromise it.

Two practical failures worth avoiding

Confirm the receiving laboratory actually has -20 °C or -80 °C storage before dispatch. And record the lot number in your experimental notes — if something looks wrong months later, an unrecorded lot number makes the problem untraceable.

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