Arctic Directory 2018: Lynden handles critical samples for Ebola vaccine

Petroleum News

Lynden International said Jan. 23 that it has been assisting government and non-government organizations with transportation and logistics in West Africa since the Ebola crisis in 2014.

Phil Maxson recently returned from the EBOVAC-Salone Labs at Kambia District Hospital in West Africa. That’s where Lynden’s customer, Clinical RM, is working on a clinical trial of Ebola vaccine in Sierra Leone.

Ebola is a rare and deadly disease caused by infection with one of the Ebola virus species. “This particular project involves Lynden transporting human blood samples from the clinical trial to the U.S. and Europe for testing,” explains Maxson, Lynden International’s director of international operations.

Once the lab has loaded all the samples into the special canister containers, Lynden handles the shipping of the units to various labs located in the U.S. and Europe.

Due to the difficulty in keeping the samples frozen and stable during the long transport back to the U.S., Lynden is using liquid nitrogen dry shipping containers to maintain a temperature of minus 150C for up to 10 days.

The containers are more commonly known as ‘dewars.’ “Each LN2 Shipper can accommodate up to 405 2ml vials, and is equipped with a GPS-temperature sensor so at any time, except when on an aircraft in the air, we can monitor the temperature and see exactly where the unit is anywhere in the world,” Maxson said.

“First we ship the charged, but empty containers into Sierra Leone and then deliver them to the laboratory which is about three and a half hours from Freetown, Sierra Leon’s capital city.”

Lynden handles the transportation of over 400 shipments per year into and out of Africa for various organizations; many of these are temperature-controlled products requiring specialized handling.