Our Shipping Process: How We Transport Eggs Safely

If you’re looking to use frozen donor eggs to conceive, it’s important to know the entirety of the donor egg process.   

Shipping your chosen eggs from the facility where they were retrieved to your clinic is a vital part of the process. Protecting frozen eggs is a delicate endeavor that involves a variety of steps to ensure they arrive safely and uncompromised. 

With the shipping of something as important as your eggs, it’s crucial to have the right shipping partner with extensive knowledge of the process and a robust proven track record.  

We here at Donor Egg Bank USA are vested in giving the task the due diligence and care it deserves. We work with top trained experts in the field and the most advanced technology to ensure the eggs that arrive to you are of top quality. 

To date, we are leading the industry with 8,500 egg lots shipped and a current clinical pregnancy rate of 59% per transfer. 

When you choose us, we take the stress out of the shipping of your eggs. Here’s how we do it. 

What is Vitrification and How Does It Safeguard Your Eggs? 

When frozen donor eggs first started being used a few decades ago, they were frozen using a slow-freezing method. This slow freezing technique proved to yield sub-par results and inspired scientists to find a process that would be better in preserving the integrity of the eggs. 

Vitrification technology, which began being utilized in the early 2000’s, changed everything. Vitrification is an innovative flash-freezing process that works to protect eggs from deterioration and ice crystal formation by exposing them to advanced cryoprotectants before freezing. 

While this state-of-art process has proven to be reliable and successful in maintaining frozen eggs’ structural and developmental competence, it requires the eggs to be kept at temperatures of below -120 degree Celsius until they’re utilized. 

Thus, controlling the temperature of the eggs is crucial during the shipping process. 

So, How Do We Ship Eggs Without Damaging Them?

To safely accommodate the needs of our eggs, we ship them in a thermo-style compartment called a dry shipper. The dry shippers we utilize commonly produce stable temperatures at -170 degrees in Celsius and can control the temperature of the eggs for up to 14 days at a time.  

Further, our experts utilize a very carefully thought-out protocol of our design to handle and place the eggs in the dry shipper before they are shipped. This includes using liquid nitrogen to prepare the shipper in order to safeguard the integrity of the eggs. 

Depending on their destination, frozen eggs can be shipped by vehicles outfitted with special equipment or by aircraft. 

Though we ask that you and your clinic allow for a two-week window to coordinate shipping, we use priority shipping for our shippers and they’re able to arrive to their intended destinations in no more than 1-2 business days. 

How Do We Ensure Quality of the Eggs When They Arrive?

When you’re using frozen donor eggs, you deserve the peace of mind that comes with knowing your eggs are well taken care of. 

When the shipper with your eggs arrives at your clinic, it also arrives with documentation to ensure that the eggs in the shipper are the ones you have chosen to use. Having layers of protection in place to certify that an intended parent’s eggs are being sent to the correct location is a top priority for us.  

After your clinic receives the shipper with your eggs, they inspect a compartment within it that is able to verify its internal temperature. With this inspection, clinicians are able to determine whether or not the eggs have been compromised during the shipping process.

Though, it is extremely rare that a dry shipper’s internal temperature is compromised, if our clinicians found that the temperature of the eggs had deviated in any way, we wouldn’t allow the eggs to be used. 

If the dry shipper is found acceptable, the eggs are then carefully removed from the container using a very specific process to ensure their quality is maintained.

Unlike traditional shipping companies for frozen genetic materials that don’t provide insurance if their material is jeopardized, Donor Egg Bank USA stands by the quality of our eggs with our blastocyst guarantee. 

You can rest assured that if your egg lot doesn’t produce a blastocyst that we will replaced it.

Navigating the complicated journey of having a baby using assisted fertility treatments is no easy feat - don’t make the process any harder than it has to be when shipping your eggs.

With Frozen Donor Egg Bank USA on your side, you can feel confident that you are getting the best quality eggs and that they are handled with the utmost care they deserve. 

Feel free to connect with us today to learn more about our process. Let’s work together to make your dream of having a baby a reality!