Releasing a haematopoietic cell unit to a courier is the point where a transplant centre hands over something it cannot replace and cannot test on arrival. Most courier conversations start with price and routing. These ten questions are the ones that actually separate a transport operation from a parcel service, and each one has a published standard behind it rather than a preference. Forward this to whoever is vetting the courier.
1. Who physically holds the unit, and when does that change?
WMDA's courier guidelines ask that the courier remain in continuous possession of the cellular therapy product at all times. FACT-JACIE draws the same line in different words: shipping is handing a product to a carrier, transport is a product that never leaves the control of trained personnel.
So ask for the handover points by name. A good answer is two: collection at your facility, release at the receiving one. If the answer includes a depot, a consolidation hub, a partner network or an overnight hold, you are buying shipping and calling it transport.
2. Where does it travel on the aircraft?
This question catches more couriers than it should. The guidance is not simply "carry-on". A cellular therapy product must never travel in checked luggage, and it should not be stowed inside the courier's own cabin bag either — it travels as its own item, positioned under the seat in front of the courier.
Ask what happens if the cabin is full and the crew asks to gate-check it. The courier should have a written carrier approval in hand, obtained per booking through the airline's cargo or dangerous goods division, not an assumption that the general customer service line's answer will hold at the gate.
3. What happens at the security checkpoint?
WMDA asks couriers to make every possible effort to prevent the product passing through X-ray or other irradiation screening, and recommends the container carry a label reading MEDICAL SPECIMEN – HANDLE WITH CARE DO NOT X-RAY.
"Every possible effort" is a floor, not a policy. Ask what the courier does when manual inspection is refused. There are only two honest answers: the shipment waits, or the shipment goes through the machine. A courier who has never had to answer that question has not run enough routes.
Then ask who wrote the supporting letters. Letters addressed to airport security carry weight when they come from the releasing and receiving facilities, on their own letterhead, naming the courier company and the authorisation reference — not from the courier alone.
4. What container, for which temperature, and validated how?
The two jobs are not interchangeable. Cryopreserved units — cord blood, and anything else frozen — travel at or below −150 °C in a vapour-phase liquid nitrogen dry shipper, typically running near −196 °C. Fresh apheresis products and marrow harvests travel at +2 °C to +8 °C in a validated isothermal container, where the constraint is the clock rather than the thermometer.
A courier who owns only dry shippers cannot carry your fresh product, whatever the website says. Ask which container they would use for your specific unit, how long it holds, and when it was last validated. For a dry shipper, ask about charge and hold time against the planned routing plus a realistic delay.
5. Is there a logger, and who gets the trace?
WMDA recommends data loggers for all cellular therapy shipments, and for cryopreserved product asks the courier company to confirm before departure that the device is installed, activated and functioning. NetCord-FACT builds continuous monitoring into the cord blood shipping kit.
Ask two things: whether a calibrated logger runs for the whole journey, and whether your centre receives the full trace on arrival as a matter of course. A verbal "it was fine" is not a record.
This matters more for cellular therapy than for almost any pharmaceutical. A cryopreserved unit cannot be meaningfully assessed after a suspected excursion — a viability assay can read acceptably after damaging devitrification, because what has been lost is engraftment capacity rather than membrane integrity. The unit looks sound until it fails in the patient. There is no risk-based release decision available to you at the far end, which is why the trace is the only evidence you will ever have.
6. What quality system sits behind the courier?
WMDA asks a commercial courier company to maintain an established quality management system, and specifies what it has to cover at minimum: courier selection, training, incident management, and documentation of corrective actions.
That is a system, not a certificate, and it is worth interrogating as one. Ask how individual couriers are selected and trained, what qualification they hold for transporting category B infectious substances under UN3373, and what happened the last time something went wrong — what the incident was, and what was changed afterwards. A courier company that cannot describe a corrective action has either never had an incident or does not record them.
7. What is the contract?
The guidelines expect a formal, clearly defined relationship between the transport company and the organisation responsible for the arrangement, preferably established through a contract or a service level agreement.
Ask whether you will receive a written agreement for this transport, scoped to this leg, or whether you are being added to a standing arrangement signed by somebody else. On a multi-leg route where more than one company is involved, ask which company is contractually responsible for which leg, and get it in writing before the unit moves.
8. What happens when a flight fails?
Not if. Ask for the plan: who decides to re-route, who holds authority to delay, how the container is re-charged or re-conditioned if the delay runs long, and who tells your centre. For fresh product, ask how the courier recalculates against the viability window you set — and whether they will tell you when the window can no longer be met, rather than arriving late and letting you find out.
9. Who obtains the paperwork, and by when?
For an international move the travelling pack usually runs to eight documents: the patient or donor agreement, a written agreement with each facility, a no X-ray letter from each end addressed to its own airport's security authority, a customs release letter for the destination, a copy of the export authorisation naming the courier company, and the airline's written carry-on approval.
Your centre holds the licensing and consent side. Ask the courier which of the remaining items they prepare and chase, and which they expect from you. Then ask what happens on a route with a stopover — every transit point needs to be addressed in the documentation, and a pack that covers origin and destination while ignoring an intermediate stop is a common way a well-planned move stalls on the ground.
10. Who answers the phone at three in the morning?
Ask for the name of the person who will be holding your unit, and a number that reaches someone with authority while that person is in the air. Transport runs on timezones that do not respect office hours. If the only contact is a general enquiries address, you will find that out at the worst possible moment.
How We Answer These
Point-to-point hand-carry, clinic to clinic, with the same named courier from collection to release. The tank travels in the cabin as its own item and is never checked in or sent as cargo. Manual inspection is secured in advance in writing, and if it is refused the shipment does not proceed. Cryopreserved units travel in a vapour-phase dry shipper, the MVE SC 4/3; fresh apheresis and marrow products travel in validated +2–8 °C containers. Calibrated loggers run on high-value and time-critical transports and the receiving centre is given the full history on arrival. Behind it sits ISO 9001 quality management, UN3373 qualification for every member of staff, and a written agreement issued per leg. More than twelve years, more than 1,250 successful transfers to date, across more than thirty countries.
We do not hold WMDA or FACT-JACIE courier accreditation and will not imply that we do. Ask us these ten questions the way you would ask anyone else.
Send us the route and the product type and we will answer all ten in writing before you commit to anything. We respond within the hour.
Chat on WhatsAppLast reviewed: 6 October 2026.