A cooling failure at the Meridian Clinical Archive in Singapore has put 14 medical studies on hold after 6,420 biological samples warmed beyond their storage limits, the facility said on Monday. The accident happened on Sunday at its one-north site, where a maintenance worker struck a chilled-water pipe; no one was injured.
Temperature monitors show that one freezer room rose from -80°C (-112°F) to -51°C (-59.8°F) over five hours and 42 minutes. The archive said 1,140 samples crossed the threshold set by their research protocols, and none had been released for clinical treatment.
Samples under review
The archive stores blood, tissue and other specimens donated for research into cancer, heart disease and immune conditions. Its director, Monika Dragić, said staff moved unaffected material to backup freezers and were checking sample-by-sample whether the exposed material remained suitable for its intended use.
“We will not label a sample usable simply because it looks intact,” Dragić said. “The research teams need a reliable record of what happened to every freezer, and that takes time.” The facility said its digital temperature loggers continued recording throughout the incident.
We will not label a sample usable simply because it looks intact.
Monika Dragić, archive director
The interruption lands during a long-running expansion of Singapore’s health-research computing and storage capacity. In 2025, MicroVale Systems withdrew from a proposed large AI data centre in the city, prompting officials to reshape a related public research campus and defer some backup infrastructure, according to the archive’s project timeline.
The archive was not part of the abandoned AI project, but its shared campus was built under the revised plan. The health ministry said the archive’s second cooling loop was still being installed when Sunday’s pipe damage interrupted the first. It has asked the operator to explain why the backup was not ready before the facility began storing research specimens.
Patients await study timelines
Divya Vig, a health ministry spokeswoman, said the paused studies would not change current patient care. Three trials have delayed new enrolments while their teams check whether samples already collected can still be analysed; researchers will contact participants if a study’s schedule changes, she said.
The affected samples came from several research programmes, including long-term studies that rely on repeated donations from the same participants. Rebecca Larson, a clinician involved in one programme, said losing a usable sample could mean waiting months for the next collection point, but cautioned that investigators had not yet established how many would be discarded.
The archive has transferred remaining specimens to two other research facilities and expects the affected freezers to return to service by Tuesday evening. The health ministry said the technical review would examine the pipe strike, alarm response and delayed backup loop; it has not set a date for the studies to resume.
The facility’s expansion is now under review, including whether future storage rooms should have separate cooling systems rather than share campus infrastructure. Dragić said the archive would publish a count of usable and unusable samples after researchers complete their checks, expected by 2 November.
