Freezing and thawing organs for transplant moves one step closer

 In March, surgeons at Mass General Hospital thawed and transplanted a frozen pig organ into a pig.  The challenge of freezing and then thawing an organ back to life, so that it can be stored until an appropriate transplant can be arranged, is one of long standing. The difficulty is that during both freezing and thawing, there is a danger of ice crystals forming inside the cells, which would destroy them.

Here's a NYT article that explains why being able to freeze and then successfully thaw organs could help relieve the congestion in kidney transplants for humans.

This Kidney Was Frozen for 10 Days. Could Surgeons Transplant It?
Scientists developed a way to freeze a large mammal’s kidney, which could ease organ shortages in the future. First, they had to see if their method would work in a pig.   By Gina Kolata

"the promise from freezing and storing organs is great.

"There is a severe and ongoing shortage of kidneys for transplants — more than 92,000 people are on waiting lists. One reason is that the window of 24 to 36 hours is so brief that it limits the number of recipients who are good matches.

"How much better it might be to have a bank of stored, frozen organs so an organ transplant could be almost like an elective surgery.

"That, at least, has been the decades-long dream of transplant surgeons.

But the attempts of medical researchers to freeze organs were thwarted at every turn. In many cases, ice crystals formed and destroyed the organs. "

 

HT: Colin Rowat

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Here's an earlier post, about a 2017 paper that turns out to have set some of the goal posts:

Monday, June 12, 2017  Organ preservation could bring big changes to transplantation

Transplantation would be a lot less hectic if organs could be preserved. Here's a 42-author paper (the biggest coauthorship I've been involved in) that discusses some of the possibilities.

The promise of organ and tissue preservation to transform medicine 
 Sebastian Giwa, Jedediah K Lewis, Luis Alvarez, Robert Langer, Alvin E Roth, George M Church, James F Markmann, David H Sachs, Anil Chandraker, Jason A Wertheim, Martine Rothblatt, Edward S Boyden, Elling Eidbo, W P Andrew Lee, Bohdan Pomahac, Gerald Brandacher, David M Weinstock, Gloria Elliott, David Nelson, Jason P Acker, Korkut Uygun, Boris Schmalz, Brad P Weegman, Alessandro Tocchio, Greg M Fahy, Kenneth B Storey, Boris Rubinsky, John Bischof, Janet A W Elliott, Teresa K Woodruff, G John Morris, Utkan Demirci, Kelvin G M Brockbank, Erik J Woods, Robert N Ben, John G Baust, Dayong Gao, Barry Fuller, Yoed Rabin, David C Kravitz, Michael J Taylor & Mehmet Toner

Nature Biotechnology 35, 530–542 (2017) doi:10.1038/nbt.3889
Published online 07 June 2017

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Here's the Google Scholar link, which also includes links to the subsequent literature:

The promise of organ and tissue preservation to transform medicine

S Giwa, JK Lewis, L Alvarez, R Langer, AE Roth… - Nature …, 2017 - nature.com

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