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Is minus 20 °C an acceptable storage condition for lyophilised orforglipron?

Asked 22 Nov 2024Modified 16 months agoViewed 49k times
39

What I have: minus 20 °C · orforglipron.

I would rather be corrected now than propagate something wrong.

I am specifically not interested in a testimonial; I am interested in a measurement.

How well supported is this claim?

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JH
askedjana_horakova10k1422 Nov 2024
8Voting to keep this open — it is more specific than it first looks. – tyndall_haze 7 months ago
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5 Answers

Accepted answer first, then by votes
102

Accepted answer

minus 20 °C is colder than anything a lyophilised cake needs. minus 20 °C is 25 kelvin below a refrigerator, and below the glass transition of a lyophilised cake the ten-degree rule of thumb stops applying at all — solid-state chemistry is not slow liquid chemistry, it is a different regime, and the failure modes that survive it are mechanical rather than chemical. A dry cake has no solvent to react in, so the marginal benefit below a domestic freezer is small and the marginal risk is not: freeze-thaw on the way in and out, and condensation on a cold stopper when you open it, are the failure modes that actually happen at minus 20 °C. Nothing here is medical advice, and research-use-only material is not approved for human use.

Keep the paperwork with the material, or the material becomes anonymous.

Let a refrigerated or frozen vial equilibrate to room temperature before opening, so humid air does not condense water onto a cold cake.

Keep vials in their original carton or in an opaque box. Light exposure matters for tryptophan-containing sequences and for anything with a chromophore, and a closed box is free.

The 28-day in-use period for preservative-containing multi-dose preparations is printed on the diluent labelling and is a long-standing pharmacy convention.

Dry, cold, dark, still. Four words and you have the answer.

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EL
answered · acceptedesben_lykke84k15813 Feb 2025
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89

The short version: powder in the freezer or fridge, reconstituted in the fridge for weeks, and never anything on a windowsill.

Position matters less than people think: upright or on its side makes no difference to a lyophilised powder, and upright is marginally better for a reconstituted vial because it keeps the stopper dry.

Keep the certificate with the vial, physically or as a photograph filed under the lot code. A vial without a traceable certificate is an anonymous vial regardless of where it came from.

The caveat is that storage conditions preserve what you have and cannot improve it.

Equilibrate before opening or you condense water into the cake.

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MF
answeredmeniscus_film32k2724 Feb 2025
2This should be linked from the help pages. – RP_C18 29 days ago
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46

Start with the physical state, because lyophilised and reconstituted material have completely different storage answers.

Lyophilised powder: refrigerated at two to eight degrees for months, frozen at minus twenty for longer. The gain from minus eighty over minus twenty is small for a dry solid and is not usually worth the arrangement.

Store with the desiccant sachet if one was supplied, inside the secondary container rather than loose in a drawer. Residual moisture is the dominant variable in solid-state stability.

Residual moisture is the dominant determinant of solid-state stability, which is why desiccants accompany lyophilised material.

Keep the desiccant with the vial and the certificate with the lot code.

edited 20 Mar 2025 by mala_venkatesh — reworded for clarity after a comment

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MV
answeredmala_venkatesh22k3719 Mar 2025
6Adding a vote because this deserves more of them. – Dr_Otto_Lindqvist 9 months ago
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28

This is the tag where the advice is cheapest to follow and most often ignored.

Label the vial at reconstitution with the date, the concentration and the resulting units per dose. This is the single most useful thirty seconds in the whole process.

Minus eighty buys very little over minus twenty for a dry solid.

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LC
answeredlyoph_cake78k26711 Dec 2024
-3

Answer first: dry, cold, dark and still, with the lot code where you can still read it in a year.

Reconstituted with a preservative-containing diluent: refrigerated, conventionally treated as usable for about 28 days from first entry. Without a preservative, single use and discard.

Two-to-eight-degree refrigeration and minus-twenty freezing are the standard storage conditions for lyophilised peptides in supplier documentation across the market.

Label the vial at reconstitution with date, concentration and units per dose.

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C3
answeredcharge_state_316k388 Mar 2025
5Confirming that opening a cold vial in a humid room is a genuinely bad idea. – bea_castellanos 5 months ago
6Small correction: it is the number of cycles rather than the freezer temperature that does the damage. – Dr_Rosalind_Achebe 7 months ago
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Your answer

Ask PeptideStack is a static archive. Posting is closed, but the norms are worth stating: answer the question that was asked, show your working, cite the trial or the certificate, and say plainly where the evidence runs out.

Not medical advice. Research-use-only compounds are not approved for human use.