BIOLIFE SOLUTIONS INC

Board of Directors and Shareholders

Opinion on the financial statements

We have audited the accompanying consolidated balance sheets of BioLife Solutions, Inc. and subsidiaries (the “Company”) as of December 31, 2023 and 2022, the related consolidated statements of operations, comprehensive loss, shareholders’ equity, and cash flows for each of the two years in the period ended December 31, 2023, and the related notes (collectively referred to as the “financial statements”). In our opinion, the financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company as of December 31, 2023 and 2022, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for each of the two years in the period ended December 31, 2023, in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.

We also have audited, in accordance with the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States) (“PCAOB”), the Company’s internal control over financial reporting as of December 31, 2023, based on criteria established in the 2013 Internal Control—Integrated Framework issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (“COSO”), and our report dated February 29, 2024 expressed an adverse opinion.

Adoption of New Accounting Standard

As discussed in Note 1 to the consolidated financial statements, the Company has changed its method of accounting for credit losses in 2023 due to the adoption of ASU 2016-13, Measurement of Credit Losses on Financial Instruments.

Basis for opinion

These financial statements are the responsibility of the Company’s management. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on the Company’s financial statements based on our audits. We are a public accounting firm registered with the PCAOB and are required to be independent with respect to the Company in accordance with the U.S. federal securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB.

We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud. Our audits included performing procedures to assess the risks of material misstatement of the financial statements, whether due to error or fraud, and performing procedures that respond to those risks. Such procedures included examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. Our audits also included evaluating the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall presentation of the financial statements. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.

Critical audit matter

The critical audit matter communicated below is a matter arising from the current period audit of the financial statements that was communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that: (1) relates to accounts or disclosures that are material to the financial statements and (2) involved our especially challenging, subjective, or complex judgments. The communication of critical audit matters does not alter in any way our opinion on the financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matter below, providing a separate opinion on the critical audit matter or on the accounts or disclosures to which it relates.

Consolidated Financial Statements - Impact of Internal Control over Financial Reporting

As described in Management’s Report on Internal Control Over Financial Reporting, material weaknesses were identified as of December 31, 2023. The prevention, detection, and correction of material misstatements of the consolidated financial statements, is dependent, in part, on management (i) designing and maintaining an effective control environment, including maintaining sufficient resources within the accounting and financial reporting department to review complex financial reporting transactions; and updating and distributing accounting policies and procedures across the organization (ii) designing and implementing effective information and communication process to identify and assess the source of and controls necessary to ensure the reliability of information used in financial reporting and that communicates relevant information about roles and responsibilities for internal control over financial reporting and (iii) designing and implementing effective process-level control activities and general information technology controls related to financial reporting processes. We identified the impact on our audit of the material weaknesses related to the control environment, information and communication, and control activities (“material weaknesses”), as further described in Management’s Report, as a critical audit matter.

The principal consideration for our determination that the impact on our audit of the material weaknesses is a critical audit matter is that especially challenging auditor judgment was required in designing audit procedures and evaluating audit evidence due to the ineffective system of internal control over financial reporting, which affects substantially all consolidated financial statement account balances and disclosures.

Our audit procedures related to the material weaknesses included the following, among others.

•We determined the nature and extent of audit procedures that are responsive to the identified material weaknesses and evaluated the evidence obtained from the procedures performed.

•We lowered the threshold used for investigating differences noted for recorded amounts.

•We selected larger sample sizes for tests of details.

•We substantively tested the accuracy and completeness of system-generated reports used in the audit and more extensively tested these reports.

•We increased the extent of supervision over the execution of audit procedures.

/s/GRANT THORNTON LLP

We have served as the Company's auditor since 2022.

Bellevue, Washington

February 29, 2024