Accepted answer
Forty-two days at 30 °C is about 238 refrigerated days of equivalent exposure. 30 °C is 25 kelvin above the 5 °C middle of a 2–8 °C refrigerator. The ten-degree rule of thumb — degradation rate roughly doubling per 10 K — makes that about 5.7 times the refrigerated rate, which is an order-of-magnitude statement and not a shelf life. At 238 equivalent days you are outside what the original certificate speaks to, and a content assay is the test that changes your arithmetic — purity can look untouched while the milligrams have moved. Either way, record the forty-two days and the temperature now, while you still know them; an excursion you did not write down is an excursion you cannot interpret later.
Start with the physical state, because it changes the answer completely and is the first thing to establish.
That is the argument for shipping lyophilised rather than for shipping colder. A dry powder with low residual moisture is stable at ambient for months; the pathways that matter need water.
A pack that arrived hard tells you about the last day of transit only, since it will have melted and, if the ambient dropped, partially refrozen.
Arrhenius kinetics predict approximately a doubling of degradation rate per ten-degree rise and are the standard basis for cold-chain design.
Reconstituted material has a genuine cold-chain requirement and it starts the moment water is added.
Buy a logger if you actually want to know. Everything else is inference.
2Adding a vote because this deserves more of them. – a_lindgren 40 days ago Does the same reasoning apply to material already in solution, or is that a different curve? – RP_C18 10 months ago add a comment