United States Patent and Trademark Office grants patent for the MLM Safeguard Box

What might just look like a cardboard box with a styrofoam inlet and a gel pack is MLM’s patented solution for ambient transport samples. Already two years ago it was patented in Italy in Germany, based on scientific data, which was collected in a bachelor and master thesis and published in Pharm.Ind.7, No2, 84-289 (2017).
Reliable shipment of biological material like blood, serum and plasma samples from remote sites to central labs for standardized analysis is increasingly important in clinical trials. In the study a conventional cardboard transport box and the MLM Safeguard Box® including samples were subjected to cold stress (-30°C) and heat stress (50°C) for 3h within a 24h – simulating conditions that can be encountered during overnight transport with commercial logistics providers. The temperature profiles showed that the custom engineered blood transport system protects clinical samples against rapid temperature changes, whereas the cardboard box completely equilibrated to the external temperature after a short time. This was shown to have a direct impact on the hematology, clinical chemistry and coagulation of the study samples. While the custom-engineered blood transport system preserved all parameters of the differential blood count, the samples in the cardboard box displayed strongly altered differential blood counts after heat stress and a complete eradication of subpopulations after cold stress. The activity of liver (alanine aminotransferase – ALT, alkaline phosphatase – ALP), pancreatic (lipase) and cardiac (creatine kinase – CK, creatine kinase isotype MB – CK-MB) enzymes was maintained in the samples in the custom-engineered blood transport system, but strongly reduced (ALT, ALP, lipase) or absent (CK, CK-MB) in the samples in the cardboard box after heat stress.

Besides the scientific need there a multiple other benefits for using the MLM Safeguard Box^®:

• Convenient: all supplies delivered in one box, weight below 1 kg and therefore cost-efficient logistic costs
• Easy-to-use: color-coded and pre-labelled tubes in one stable and compact box
• Traceable: Identification via barcode – sample kit tracking via mlm online^®

More information on the MLM Safeguard Box^® including all scientific data can be found here.