Cryogenically freezing organs: Could it be possible?

Story highlights Currently, donated organs must be discarded if not used within 4 to 12 hours; longer preservation is impossible A new nanowarming technology could someday extend the life of human organs through cryopreservation CNN — A milestone in cryobiology announced this week is literally heart-warming. “Most organs, we’re talking seven to 10 years at least,” said Brockbank, who noted that the “time to market” for this technology will depend on both the science itself, which still needs some work, and the regulatory agencies, which may not intercede for human tissue banking but most likely will when it comes to organ banking. The rewarming process must be sufficiently uniform so that “we don’t crack the organ,” Bischof said. As a result of this misperception, the “cryopreservation of organs and tissues has pretty much been an orphan child of transplant biology,” with no “clear-cut places to go for funding.” As he sees it, depending on whether private or public funding becomes available, about a decade seems “a reasonable time frame” for this new nanowarming process to begin changing the existing organ bank process. “It would be great if we could take one of the kidneys when someone is 10 or 11 years old and cryopreserve it and then wait until the other kidney failed and retransplant that cryopreserved kidney.” “We can’t even really begin to think about all the possibilities,” Bleyer said.