TRANSFORMING donated organs into a glassy state and putting them on ice could enable many more people to have transplants.
When a person dies, doctors often have mere hours – or in the case of kidneys, just over a day – to find a recipient before the organ degrades.
"This precludes any chance of banking organs and makes every transplant an emergency procedure, often in the dead of night... when patients aren't ready," says Stephen van Sickle of Arigos Biomedical in Mountain View, California.
Nearly 1 in 5 donor kidneys is discarded in the US each year, because a suitable recipient or clinic cannot be found in time. But what if these organs could be frozen?
Standard freezing creates damaging ice crystals. An alternative is vitrification. This process is often used to store human eggs or embryos for years and involves infusing the tissue with an antifreeze-like liquid and rapidly cooling it to create a glassy state. Doing this with large organs such as hearts and kidneys is harder, as more antifreeze can be toxic and the glassy organ can crack.
To tackle this problem, van Sickle combined vitrification with persufflation, in which blood is replaced with a gas – helium in this case. The organ cools more quickly, less antifreeze is needed and pockets of tissue are separated by gas, protecting against shattering.
So far, van Sickle, who outlined his work at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence meeting in Cambridge, UK, has frozen pig kidneys. CT scans revealed a lot less fracturing than with vitrification alone. The next stage is to rewarm the organs to see if they remain viable.
Greg Fahy of Californian firm 21st Century Medicine has vitrified, rewarmed and transplanted smaller rabbit kidneys. The new approach is "potentially valuable", he says.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Heart of glass could be key to banking organs"
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