C-2031 : Catalyzing cryopreservation breakthroughs to save millions of lives

Abstract

The vast and growing shortage of organs leads to premature death for millions and costs to society are immense. There is further suffering, death and cost due to needed immune suppression and non-ideal organ matching. Cryopreservation of organs can help solve each of these problems. Cryopreservation of complex tissues would have many other benefits. It would enable doctors to protect the ovaries of young women with curable cancer and enable more hand and limb transplants for maimed soldiers, firefighters and civilians. Preservation of human tissues for drug screening will also, increase efficiency, reduce cost and decrease the need of animals in research. Moreover, it is a valuable complement to tissue engineering, which is already increasing the demand for cryopreservation. Stem cells, sperm, and embryos have been cryopreserved for decades, and progress in cryobiology has made it possible to bank arteries, heart valves, corneas, organ slices and more. We have also seen progress with rat hearts, pig livers, sheep ovaries, pig uteri, rodent limbs, and the cryopreservation and successful transplantation of a rabbit kidney. Building on this to make organ banking routine medicine will be a challenge. But it can be broken into six sub-challenges, each of which appears translatable into an “engineering” problem: 1. Control excessive ice formation, 2. Hold cryoprotectant toxicity within acceptable levels, 3. Limit disproportionate mechanical/thermodynamic stress, 4. Control excessive chilling injury, 5. Avoid unacceptable levels of ischemic injury, and 6. Ensure acceptable repair and revival protocols. Due to the body’s own regenerative abilities, each sub-problem need not be perfectly solved. As never before, valuable understanding and tools in other - often radically accelerating - domains are empowering cryobiologists and can, via interdisciplinary collaborations, help with each of the six sub-challenges. New Organ and the Organ Preservation Alliance, incubated at SU LABS at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, are working to accelerate these needed breakthroughs via 1. increased research funds , 2. Grand Challenge Prizes, and 3. the first global, interdisciplinary Organ Banking Summit . The Society for Cryobiology is investigating ways to support the alliance.