Thousands of people die every year waiting for organs from potential donors. Putting waiting for organs aside, often times organs don’t reach the recipient in time, leading to the donated organ dying and failing. However, this problem will soon be a thing of the past because of Cryopreservation.
No more Organ Waiting List!
A new groundbreaking process has been discovered by a research team at the University of Minnesota where they’ve successfully rewarmed large-scale animal heart valves and blood vessels preserved at very low temperatures. Organs preservation at very low temperatures has been happening for a long time, but thawing them out was always a problem. This groundbreaking discovery will solve this problem by increasing the availability of tissues & organs for transplantation with large scale organ banks, and saving millions of lives in the process. The research was published in a journal called Science Translational Medicine.
Senior author John Bischof and a sample. (Credit: University of Minnesota)
John Bischof, of the University of Minnesota said –
This is the first time that anyone has been able to scale up to a larger biological system and demonstrate successful, fast, and uniform warming of hundreds of degrees Celsius per minute of preserved tissue without damaging the tissue.
The Problem
The percentage of discarded organs from donors is very high (Over 60%!) because of the reason that they can’t be kept frozen for more than 4 hours. The waiting lists for transplants would be eliminated in 2 years if those organs were to be utilized and successfully transplanted.
Processes that cool biological samples for long-term preservation at very low temperatures between -160 and -200’C to an ice-free glassy state have been around for decades e.g. Vitrification, but the problem has always been the thawing/rewarming during which tissues often suffer major damage making them unusable.
Solution
The researchers have addressed this thawing problem in this new study by developing a revolutionary new method in which the tissue is placed in a Cryoprotectant solution and covered with silica-coated iron oxide nanoparticles. These iron oxide nanoparticles are activated using electromagnetic waves and act as tiny heaters around the tissue to rapidly and uniformly warm the tissue 10 - 100 times faster than previous methods at a rate of 100 – 200’C per minute.
The researchers were able to successfully wash away the iron oxide nanoparticles from the sample following the warming, and unlike older thawing processes, the final results showed that none of the tissues displayed any signs of harm. The technology might also be applied beyond cryogenics for delivering lethal pulses of heat to destroy cancer cells.
This study scales up to 50 milliliters, whereas in the past, 1mm was the limit which means there is a strong possibility they could scale up to even larger systems, like organs. The researchers are optimistic about the process, but Scaling up the system to accommodate entire organs will require a lot of further optimization. Experimentation with rodent organs (rat, rabbit etc.) is the next phase, and then it will be scaled up to pig organs and then human organs.
Bio-technology is one of the most exciting and most promising divisions of science. Thousands of people die every year because of non-availability of compatible and fresh organs. With this breakthrough, organs can be preserved for far longer periods without the risk of losing them. It’s very exciting to think that almost no precious organs will be wasted in the future.
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