Researchers and clinicians rely on their cold-storage equipment to maintain the integrity and quality of precious patient samples and other biological products. The failure of a cold-storage unit can compromise samples, which disrupts critical research and has a significant impact on these institutions and individuals. The failure of a storage unit such as an ultra-low temperature freezer can result not only in a substantial financial loss, but can also mean losing years of researchers’ time and effort. This means that clinicians and investigators need to take great care in selecting brands and equipment critical to protecting research or enabling the delivery of patient care.
An event that illustrates the importance of cold-storage occurred at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center (HBTRC) at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA. A freezer containing brain samples that had been collected for autism research failed there in June 2012. Unfortunately, the failure was discovered too late to prevent the brains from thawing. The Boston Globe reported that, “Among those samples were the brains of 54 people who had autism – nearly a quarter of the autism brain samples available for research into a condition that now affects 1 in 88 American children. At the time researchers said the collection, which took 14 years to amass, could set autism research back perhaps as long as a decade.”
It’s clear that reliable cold-storage equipment plays a vital role in safeguarding precious (and in some cases irreplaceable) samples so that important research can continue without delay or disruption. To help meet the challenge of providing equipment that researchers and clinicians can depend on, Helmer Scientific designed the i.Series® line of Ultra-Low Freezers. Helmer Scientific Medical-Grade Ultra-Low Freezers are designed with the reliability and quality that is demanded for sensitive and precious samples across clinical and research applications. In order to see how these Ultra-Low Freezers are made to meet these demanding requirements, visit the interactive demonstration.
References:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/11/brain-tissue-autism-freezer-fault
