Accepted answer
Seven days at 37 °C is about 64 refrigerated days of equivalent exposure. 37 °C is 32 kelvin above the 5 °C middle of a 2–8 °C refrigerator. The ten-degree rule of thumb — degradation rate roughly doubling per 10 K — makes that about 9.2 times the refrigerated rate, which is an order-of-magnitude statement and not a shelf life. At 64 equivalent days a test is more likely to reassure you than to tell you something, which is a legitimate reason to run it and a poor reason to expect a finding. Either way, record the seven days and the temperature now, while you still know them; an excursion you did not write down is an excursion you cannot interpret later.
The relevant physics is latent heat: a phase-change pack holds temperature only while it is changing phase, and once it has melted it is a warm mass.
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.
More usefully, anything shipped in solution is a different risk category, because hydrolysis and deamidation proceed in the aqueous phase and are strongly temperature-dependent.
Phase-change pack hold time is a function of mass, latent heat and insulation, and published figures for small parcels are on the order of one to two days.
Lyophilised tolerates the lane. That is the answer for almost every order.
edited 15 Jul 2026 by lane_transit — clarified the distinction between purity and content
6Is there a reason to prefer minus eighty here, or is minus twenty genuinely enough? – u100_marks 10 months ago add a comment