Cryopreservation aims to engineer novel ways to freeze, store, and thaw organs

Abstract

Five years ago, even top cryobiologists doubted that a human organ would ever be successfully frozen and thawed. It felt like “a long, long scientific step” from the freezing of cells or millimeter-thick tissues to the freezing of whole organs, says Janet Elliott, Canada Research Chair in Thermodynamics at the University of Alberta. “My opinion has changed,” Elliot professed this past August after an organ-banking conference at Harvard Medical School hosted by the nonprofit Organ Preservation Alliance (OPA). Cryopreservation methods have the potential to revive damaged organs, improve the quality of tissue models for drug discovery, and extend the amount of time a transplant organ can be preserved. Image courtesy of Shutterstock/kalewa. OPA and the US Department of Defense (DoD), which is seeking better ways to treat combat trauma, have spent the past five years attempting to unite researchers and to encourage new participation in the field of cryopreservation. The results are now manifest: What started as a long-shot effort to preserve a rabbit kidney is now a collaborative, government-funded endeavor. The practitioners of cryopreservation are experimenting with new engineering approaches for preserving larger and larger tissues, from pig heart tissue to whole rat limbs. Although whole-organ banking remains years if not decades away, cryopreservation tools are already being applied to help revive damaged organs, improve the quality of human tissue models for drug discovery, and stretch the amount of time a transplant organ can be preserved—when even a few extra hours can save a life. Long-term cold banking of organs, or cryopreservation, has been pursued since at least the 1950s, when researchers attempted (with limited success) to cool golden hamsters to below 0 °C and rewarm them. In 1970 surgeon Thomas Starzl, who performed the first human liver transplant, wrote that there was “no way” that widespread organ transplants …