Over the last 12 months, the Polish branch of TNT Express has delivered over 11,000 shipments containing biological material – both domestically and internationally. Following the introduction of Clinical Express to the standard TNT Express offer in June 2006, a 58 percent increase was recorded in the “dry ice” shipment category alone.
The Clinical Express service provides express transport of biological material. The priority is speed and ensuring the safety of the transported substances – TNT Express enables their transport at controlled temperatures.
The substances most frequently transported under Clinical Express include: blood serum, plasma, tissues, bodily fluids, and bone marrow. This requires TNT Express to have enormous flexibility and an individual approach to each such order – e.g., in the case of bone marrow, the collection time of the shipment is entirely dependent on the time of extraction, and the delivery time must, of course, be as short as possible. In the transport of sensitive substances, TNT Express is not limited solely to the transport of biological material. The company also offers its clients the possibility of transporting food samples. Substances transported under the service also include, among others: cerebrospinal fluid, umbilical cord blood, placenta, bones, liver biopsies, eyeballs, kidneys, and other organs for transplantation. One of the most high-profile transports of this kind by TNT Express to date was the transport of tissues from Toruń swans infected with the bird flu virus. TNT Express transported them in March of this year from the National Veterinary Research Institute in Puławy to the British VLA Weybridge laboratory (New Haw, Addlestone, Surrey).
An essential element of Clinical Express is certified packaging that meets IATA (International Air Transport Association) requirements. Its design depends on the content – e.g., in the case of substances requiring transport at a controlled temperature, Medpak THERMO packaging is used. Inside, there is, among other things, a cooling insert (used in the transport of materials requiring low temperatures to be maintained) or so-called “dry ice” (solid carbon dioxide – used for substances that must be frozen during transport). Medpak THERMO guarantees the maintenance of a constant temperature for 72 or 96 hours (depending on the type of packaging selected).