Nanowarming of Vitrified Kidneys and Hearts

Long term low temperature storage of living tissue is an active area of research. Cryoprotectant perfusion allows tissues to vitrify on cooling, minimizing ice crystal formation and thus preserving the small scale structure that is vital to tissue function. The challenge of cooling to vitrification is largely the challenge of obtaining good perfusion of cryoprotectant throughout the tissue, something that is much less of an issue for an isolated organ or tissue sample than it is for an entire animal or human. The more significant challenges are those related to the goal of warming vitrified tissue while retaining full function. The near term goal for reversible vitrification is to enable more cost-effective organ donation and transplantation. That organ transplantation is a very expensive, uncertain process, and the available supply of organs very limited, is due in large part to the inability to keep an organ alive for long outside the body. In the mid-term, the transplantation industry will expand to include the manufacture of universal off-the-shelf tissues and organs that can be transplanted into any individual, grown from stocks of engineered cells. The logistics of that industry will be greatly aided by the ability to indefinitely store manufactured tissues, rather than making them to order. In the longer term, reversible vitrification will be used to preserve people who are close to death, in the hopes that future medical technology will allow their repair and r...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs