The International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER) released their newsletter this month with BioCision being featured in their “Better Mousetrap” section for enhanced patient preservation [1].

We had previously blogged about an interesting home-based trial that was carried out using the thermoconductive CoolRack® tube module. Our data indicated that use of a CoolRack module can protect samples from temperature fluctuations due to frequent door opening/closing and/or addition of room temperature samples to existing frozen collections.

Interestingly, there were some excellent additional comments on page 8 of the newsletter about the use of the -80°C freezer for storing biological samples. In fact, its globally quite a hot topic at the moment, with Ann Jansenn, Worldwide R&D for Pfizer asking whether anyone had collected data on how much the temperature of -80°C freezers varies when storing samples such as plasma, serum, blood, and other biofluids? BioCision’s CEO Rolf Ehrhardt was quoted saying “conventional -80°C freezer systems are plagued with temperature spikes as a result of their design”. Furthermore, the sputum data highlights that sample integrity is impacted when storing in the -80C freezer without a thermo-conductive CoolRack to offer a protective effect against the fluctuating temperatures.

[1] http://www.isber.org/newsletters/documents/ISBERNewsApril2012.pdf