Accepted answer
28 days is 672 hours, and phase-change shippers are qualified in hours: 96 and 120 are the common ratings. So 672 hours is 7 times a 96-hour qualification and 5.6 times a 120-hour one. Past its rated duration a phase-change pack is not partial protection — it is thermal mass that has finished changing phase, after which the payload tracks ambient. On that reading the last 552 to 576 hours are room-temperature storage in a box. The qualification also assumes a stated ambient profile, and a lane that sits on an apron in August is not the profile the figure was measured against. If you want what happened rather than what was rated, a single-use electronic logger costs less than the assay you would otherwise run afterwards and answers it with 672 hours of data instead of an argument.
If temperature history matters to you, buy a data logger. It is the only way to know.
A pack that arrived hard tells you about the last day of transit only, since it will have melted and, if the ambient dropped, partially refrozen.
Reported and extrapolated stability by condition
| State | Condition | Usable window | Basis |
|---|
| Lyophilised solid | −20 °C, sealed, dry | 24–36 months | Supplier guidance |
| Lyophilised solid | 2–8 °C, sealed | 12–24 months | Supplier guidance |
| Lyophilised solid | 25 °C, sealed | 4–8 weeks | Extrapolated (Arrhenius) |
| Lyophilised solid | 40 °C, sealed | 1–2 weeks | Extrapolated |
| Solution, preserved | 2–8 °C | 28 days | USP microbiological convention |
| Solution, preserved | 25 °C | 3–7 days | Extrapolated |
| Solution, unpreserved | 2–8 °C | 24 hours | USP microbiological convention |
Windows for the solid state are chemical; windows for solution are microbiological and usually shorter than the chemical limit.
Mechanically, arrhenius behaviour means the degradation rate roughly doubles per ten degrees. A week at thirty degrees is therefore a meaningful exposure for a solution and an immaterial one for a dry solid.
Single-use temperature loggers are standard practice in supply chains where temperature genuinely matters and are inexpensive at parcel scale.
Nothing here is medical advice, and research-use compounds are not approved for human use.
The domestic leg is the part you control. Refrigerate it promptly.
7This should be in the site help pages rather than buried in an answer. – Dr_Fatima_Belkacem 7 months ago add a comment