Running on Ice: Organ transportation goes subzero

Hello, and welcome to the coolest community in freight!

You know what’s cool? This year’s Future of Freight Festival. It takes place Nov. 19-21 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. What makes it so cool is the beautiful fall foliage, the industry leader talks and the fun. Sure, all conferences say they’re the fun ones, but this one actually is. Not to mention, the Chattanooga Aquarium is quite chilly for the penguins. This year, subscribers to Running on Ice get a promo code exclusive to us! You can register with this link or use the code F3ROI24 at checkout for a discount. Spoiler alert: It is the best deal on tickets you can get. 

All thawed out

A huge development for organ transportation comes out of Baltimore this week. Dr. Gerald Brandacher led a surgical and research team that removed a kidney from a pig at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and transported the kidney on a commercial aircraft to the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria. Preserved for roughly 48 hours at subzero temperatures, the kidney was assessed in Innsbruck on a clinical-grade machine perfusion device and demonstrated viability and functionality.

Not only was this successful once, but the team has repeated this process five times in the past year. The transplant was completed with the pig, and the kidney had normal function during the entire observation period, which was 200 days post-transplant – all after the kidney had been preserved at subzero temperatures for 72 hours. 

According to the news release, “The kidneys were preserved in X-Therma’s XT-ViVo® solution in X-Therma’s TimeSeal® device. X-Therma is a biotechnology company developing a biopreservation platform for regenerative medicines and organs for transplant. XT-ViVo® is a non-toxic, serum- and protein-free organ preservation solution that uses peptoids to prevent damaging ice crystal formation, enabling ice-free preservation of organs between 0°C and -20°C.”

The technology is only used in pigs at the moment, but it’s not an unrealistic expectation for it to be a viable option for humans soon. To say this is revolutionary for the transplant world is an understatement. This means that virtually any organ can get anywhere in the world, safely preserved, improving quality of life for those desperately needing the transplants.

Temperature checks

An acquisition is afoot. Cold Chain Technologies has acquired Tower Cold Chain. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but it is expected to be a huge boost to the life sciences sector of the cold chain. The acquisition game isn’t new to Cold Chain Technologies: This is the company’s fourth acquisition since it partnered with Aurora Capital Partners in 2019. 

In a news release, Ranjeet Banerjee, CEO of Cold Chain Technologies, said: “Tower has developed an impressive portfolio of highly technical, robust reusable products capable of exceeding the stringent requirements of global pharmaceutical clients. We are thrilled to partner with Niall and the entire Tower team to offer exciting new products and geographic service capabilities to our current and prospective customers. This combination further establishes CCT as the leader in temperature-controlled packaging solutions with unmatched thermal engineering expertise, digital monitoring and tracking, global manufacturing, and commitment to sustainability.” 

Food and drug

It’s almost the holiday season, which means retailers are stocking up on necessities, such as butter. While it’s not the first thing people think of when it comes to top buys for the holidays, it’s definitely a top contender. Americans buy about 161 million pounds of butter during the holiday season. Fun fact: That’s enough butter to make over 11 billion butter cookies. Butter sales increase 29% in November and 24% in December.

Butter is a component of just about every dish at Thanksgiving and arguably one of the more important parts of holiday baked goods. It’s everywhere. This year butter is expected to cost a little less than in previous years. In the spring, more cream was available and more butter was made and put into cold storage.

Robin Schmahl, owner of AgDairy LLC, said in a Brownfield AG News article: “Less butter production from the European Union and Oceania helped U.S. butter exports, but there’s another reason the export numbers look good. We were so depressed on butter exports going into this year that even though we do see some increase there, it’s magnified because we started from a lot lower levels, so it’s good to see that we’re seeing some more growth and demand from the export market.”

Cold chain lanes

This week’s market under a microscope is in the Pacific Northwest: Seattle – home of Starbucks and probably far too many coffee shops to count. Capacity is loosening in Seattle as reefer outbound tender volumes and reefer outbound tender rejections head in opposite directions. Reefer outbound tender volumes are on the decline but are still up 25.81% week over week. 

Taking almost an equally large jump are reefer outbound tender rejections. Rejection rates have fallen from 15.97% to 3.27%, a 1,040-basis-point drop w/w. With a sharp drop-off in rejections, spot rates are likely to take a hit for the next few weeks until demand returns for the final months of the year.

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Shelf life

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Wanna chat in the cooler? Shoot me an email with comments, questions or story ideas at moconnell@www.freightwaves.com.

See you on the internet.

Mary

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