A CAR-T therapy, the kind of cancer treatment made from a patient’s own immune cells, begins with a bag of blood the size of a paperback book. What happens to that bag over the next three weeks is a story of freezers, couriers and spreadsheets.
At a cancer center in Nashville last month, a nurse sealed one of those bags at 10:40 a.m. By 2 p.m., it was in a shipping container cooled with liquid nitrogen vapor, on its way to a manufacturing site in New Jersey. It arrived the next morning at about minus 150 degrees Celsius.
Every step is tracked
Each shipment carries a data logger that records temperature every minute. A courier company, one of a handful that specialize in this work, watches the readings in real time. If the temperature rises past a set limit, the cells may not be usable, and the patient may have to give blood again.
«It’s not like shipping a package. It’s like shipping a patient,» said Ruth Kaminski, who manages cell therapy logistics for the Nashville center. Her team keeps a whiteboard of every patient’s shipment, with phone numbers for the couriers at each step.
Why it matters
The trip is part of why these therapies cost so much and take so long. Patients typically wait three to four weeks for their cells to be modified and shipped back, and some get sicker in that time. Several companies are working on ways to make the cells closer to the hospital, which would shorten the trip. For now, the cold chain is the only road.