The cultures are human neurons, 14-week old and growing in a basal medium with BDNF, GDNF, ascorbic acid and cAMP. Transport time is about 45 minutes. THanks!
We did it with cerebellar granule neurons, transport took around 30 min and they survived fine.
What we did was to place coolpacks on a bath at 37ºC, then we put them on a styrofoam box covering all the bottom. You fill your plates with approx double of the medium to avoid medium-wave formation. Close the plates with (a lot) of parafilm to mantain both sterility and pH as long as possible. Stick your plates to the warm coolpacks. (you can also put 50ml falcon with 37ºC water on the sides. Put some paper on top making all the thing as compact as possible. Close your box and transport them as softly as possible. When arriving live the cells for a few hours inside the incubator before changing medium to recover. Hope it works, but try first with just a few wells to see if your human neurons are tough enough to make it.
My own transport candidates were low-density rat hippocampal neurons (3 div) in 24-wells. The medium was Neurobasal + B27, transport by car took ca. 1 h. We packed the plates exactly the same way: Warm coolpacks in big styro box. To keep the plates in place, we stuffed residual spaces with tissue. Instead of Parafilm, we used dish-sealing tape: Tight, mechanically stable, will not melt when warm. Search "PetriSeal" or similar. The neurons survived just fine :) Human neurons: Definitely try with a small number first. Good luck!
How's it going? Good to hear from you. Thanks for your response. I will look for the Petriseal. I am just a bit afraid of the mechanical stress that may cause the neurons to detach. But I will certainly try with a "mock" culture first.