How to deep freeze an entire organ —and bring it back to life

MINNEAPOLIS— The rat kidney on the operating table in front of Joseph Sushil Rao looked like it had been through hell. Which it had—a very cold one. Normally a deep pink, this thumbnail-size organ was blanched a corpselike gray. In the past 6 hours, it had been plucked from the abdomen of a white lab rat, pumped full of a black fluid, stuck in a freezer cooled to –150°C, and zapped by a powerful magnet. Now, in a cramped, windowless room on the 11th floor of the University of Minnesota’s (UMN’s) Malcolm Moos Health Sciences Tower, Rao lifted the kidney from a small plastic box and gently laid it inside the open abdomen of another white rat. Peering through a microscope, the transplant surgeon–in–training deftly spliced the kidney’s artery and vein into the rat’s abdominal blood vessels using a thread half the thickness of a human hair. When he finally removed the tiny clips pinching off the blood supply from the aorta, the kidney blushed pink, a good first sign. Then he waited. Forty-five minutes later, a golden drop of urine emerged from the ureter that would normally feed from the kidney to the bladder. Just before midnight, Rao snapped a close-up photo with his iPhone, proof that the kidney was working. He sent the photo and an ecstatic email to his two bosses, transplant surgeon Erik Finger and biomedical engineer John Bischof, titled “First successful transplant of vitrified, nanowarmed rat kidney.” “I’m out o...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news