The Future of Cryopreservation

The ability to cryopreserve and thaw organs via vitrification, without ice formation and significant tissue damage, allowing for indefinite storage time, would go a long way towards simplifying the logistics and reducing the costs of present organ donation and future tissue engineering of organs for transplantation. Cryopreservation via vitrification also offers the possibility of indefinitely storing the terminally ill and recently deceased until such time as medical science advances to the point of restoration. This has been practiced for several decades by the small cryonics industry. Cryonics is a long shot, but better odds by far than the grave. The challenges to progress in cryonics seem largely technical: it is presently possible to vitrify organs, but thawing them safely is another story entirely. Scaling up the reliability of vitrification processes to the whole body continues to be a work in progress, even while practiced by the cryonics community. The funding for technological progress in this field remains sparse, a situation that could be remedied by an industry of organ cryopreservation associated with donation and transplantation. Given a world in which it is routine to vitrify and thaw donated organs, it will be far easier to accept the cryopreservation of terminally ill individuals in hope of a better, more capable future, and more funds will be drawn to that goal. Cryopreservation has multiple and important applications, particularly in medic...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs