Breaking the Bottleneck: New Technology Enables Deep Cryopreservation of Large-Scale Organs
Release time:
2026-04-20
In the field of organ transplantation, donor shortages and short preservation times have long plagued the medical community. Recently, a research team led by Professor Rao Wei and Professor Liu Jing at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published groundbreaking results in the journal Matter. They pioneered a new paradigm based on liquid metal — "interventional multi-scale enhanced heat transfer" — successfully breaking the technical bottleneck of deep cryogenic vitrification preservation of large-scale organs. For the first time internationally, they achieved allogeneic transplantation survival of a 10 mL rabbit kidney after one week of deep cryopreservation. This breakthrough brings new hope for building "organ banks" and alleviating donor shortages.
The "Thermal Fracture" Crisis in Large-Scale Organ Cryopreservation
Deep cryogenic vitrification preservation (−120°C to −196°C) can avoid ice crystal damage and is an ideal approach for long-term or even permanent organ preservation. However, real organs have complex multi-level vascular networks, and biological tissues themselves have extremely low thermal conductivity. During rapid cooling and rewarming, large temperature gradients and thermal stresses easily develop inside and outside the organ, leading to macroscopic "thermal fracture." Traditional methods relying on external metal wrapping or perfusion of magnetic nanoparticles have always struggled to overcome this "heat transfer chasm" due to high interfacial thermal resistance and uneven internal heat sources.
Building an Organ "Heat Highway"
To solve this problem, the research team creatively turned to gallium-based liquid metals. They developed a flexible liquid metal cryoprotectant (LMP) made of a gallium-indium alloy mixed with polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP). Its thermal conductivity reaches 9.3 W/m·K, nearly 10 times higher than conventional nano-rewarming fluids.
Based on the liquid metal cryoprotectant and the multi-scale interventional enhanced heat transfer strategy, the team proposed a novel "interventional enhanced heat transfer" approach: First, they exploit the phase-change planarization property of liquid metals at low temperatures, allowing them to conform perfectly to irregular organ surfaces like a "liquid armor," greatly reducing contact thermal resistance. Second, they perfuse the liquid metal along with the cryoprotectant into the organ's complex vascular network, using electromagnetic thermal effects to achieve uniform volumetric heating from the inside out. This "surface + volume" cross-scale synergy completely opens the heat transfer pathways inside and outside the organ, reducing thermal stress by two orders of magnitude.
Transplantation Survival Validates Clinical Potential
The research team validated the technology on multi-scale samples. In skin and blood vessel experiments, the interventional enhanced heat transfer (IHT) technique increased post-rewarming tissue survival rates by 1.7-fold and 3.6-fold, respectively. More critically, for 10 mL rabbit kidneys with highly complex structures, the technique successfully achieved allogeneic transplantation after 7 days of deep cryogenic vitrification preservation at −150°C. Postoperative monitoring showed that the transplanted kidneys rapidly resumed blood perfusion, maintained intact morphological structure, the recipient rabbits survived for more than 4 days, and blood biochemical parameters confirmed effective recovery of kidney function.
Previously, only limited breakthroughs had been achieved internationally on 1 mL rat kidney models. The 10 mL rabbit kidney allogeneic transplantation achieved by the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry marks a milestone step toward clinical application of deep cryopreservation technology. In the future, this technology is expected to be extended to long-term preservation of human-scale organs, bringing revolutionary changes to organ transplantation.
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