(596ad) Supercooling: An Alternative Biopreservation Scheme

Shortage in donor organs is increasing every year in part due to discarded organs for lack of extended preservation protocols; tissue engineered products face a similar problem where successful technologies cannot be translated from the lab to the clinic due to a bottleneck in suitable dissemination technologies. This presentation will focus on the development of a supercooling preservation method for liver cells and tissues with a long-term goal of whole liver preservation. Supercooling involves the sunzero-nonfreezing storage of cells, tissues and organs and strives to alleviate problems faced by current solutions such as cryopreservatoin and hypothermic storage. The long term goal with these studies is to extend preservation times of cells, tissues and eventually organs to more than a week which would alleviate challenges and constraints faced by both organ transplantation studies and tissue engineered technologies. The project also aims to furnish a fundamental understanding of cell damages via molecular simulations with the long term goal of aiding and improving experimental studies.