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2020 Election

2020 Election

The Society for Cryobiology 2020 election will be held October 12 - 26, 2020. The election is for three Governor-at-Large positions for a term commencing January 2021 and ending December 2023. 

All members in good standing will receive an email in advance of the election to the email address listed in their member profile. The email will contain a personalized one-time use voting link to cast your vote anonymously at simplyvoting.com. If you do not receive your voting email within 24 hours of the election opening please check your spam folder and then contact [email protected] urgently. 

Voting Method 
Each voter is assigned 100 points to allocate to one or more candidates e.g. a voting member could give one candidate all 100 points, or divide points between any number of selected candidates.  All candidates are ranked by total number of points received, with the top 3 candidates named as the winners. 

Meet the Candidates 







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Asia's First Use of USA Organ Care System

Although a standard practice in many European countries, a medical team in Hong Kong used the Organ Care System for the first time on a human heart transplant. Invented in the USA, the Organ Care System is superior to traditional ice boxes for transporting organs by keeping the heart warm and beating with oxygenated blood up to 10 hours. Dr Timmy Au Wing-kuk, chief of Queen Mary Hospital’s cardiothoracic surgery department where the medical procedure was performed, says the implementation of the Organ Care System can increase the number of successful transplants by 5 to 10 each year. This transport method also allows medical teams to use hearts that would have been disqualified previously due to donor's age, organ condition, or travel distance. Read More...

2020 Election

Governor Nominations Open

The nominations committee is now inviting expressions of interest from all Society members in good standing for the position of Governor 2021-2023. 

Society for Cryobiology Governors take an active role in the decision making that guides the Society. Governors participate in quarterly Board meetings, and take on leadership responsibilities in various Society committees. They may also be involved in leadership roles in other Society activities of their interest, for example the Annual Meeting, or ad hoc projects. 

To express your interest please email Chair of the Nominating Committee, President Elect Dr. Greg Fahy. Please note all nominations are subject to approval by the nominations committee. This does not affect your right to nomination by petition as outlined in the society's bylaws

If your candidate nomination is accepted you will need to provide a detailed biography, statement outlining your vision for the Society, and a photograph for the election materials. 

The deadline to express your interest in standing as a candidate for Governor is September 14, 2020. The election will be held October 12-26, 2020.

The 2020 nominating committee is: 

Greg Fahy (Chair, President-Elect)
Adam Higgins (President)
Steven Mullen (Treasurer)
Erik Woods (Governor)
Ido Braslavsky (Governor)

Thank you and Farewell from Outgoing President, Dayong Gao

As my term as President of the Society for Cryobiology draws to a close, I would to express my deep appreciations and to reflect on the achievements of our society during the previous two years. 

Firstly, my sincere thanks go to my fellow Board of Governors, and particularly the Executive Committee members: Dr. Adam Higgins (President-Elect), Dr. Andy Shu (Treasurer) and Dr. Yuksel Agca (Secretary). The Executive and Board of Governors give their time freely and generously for the betterment and advancement of the Society, for which we cannot thank them enough. 

I would also like to acknowledge and thank Executive Director, Nicole Evans, for her continued and distinguished work in leading planning, development and administration for the Society. I must also thank the tireless and outstanding work of Dr. David Rawson, Editor-in-Chief, of Cryobiology and the excellent Editorial Board, who contribute their tremendous time and efforts to review the journal’s submissions to ensure the high quality and publication standard.

The Society has made many great strides during my term as President. I am exceptionally proud to have overseen the introduction of two new awards of our Society, both inaugurally awarded in 2019. Firstly, the Dayong Gao Young Investigator Award (sponsored by the GoldSim) to recognize a most outstanding young researcher in their early career, and secondly, the Arthur W. Rowe Cryobiology Best Paper Award, to recognize the most outstanding research article published in the journal each year. Furthermore, the Board of Governors is currently finalizing the Peter Mazur Prize (a Lifetime Achievement Award), which will recognize individuals who have reached the highest level of devotion and achievement in the field of cryobiology. 

I have continued to focus on forging new collaborations and strengthening and renewing familiar ties, with a number of signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with ISBER, ISCT, Knect365, and others. One of the most exciting collaborations of the last two years has been the co-publication with ISBER of the freely downloadable Liquid Nitrogen Best Practices Addendum. If you have not yet had the chance to read it, I highly recommend it.

With regard to the Annual Meeting, the Society for Cryobiology has now completed the transition period from local organizing committee to in-house organization, with Nicole leading logistics for CRYO2018 in Madrid, and logistics and fundraising for CRYO2019 in San Diego. She will continue to lead logistics and fundraising for CRYO2020 in Chicago, and beyond. One of her current focuses is to establish and cement relationships with key industry individuals to secure the financial viability and profitability of the meeting.  

As cryobiologists, we are entering a new era when cryobiology has a unique and significant contribution and impact on almost every major biological/biomedical research and application area. A once opaque science shrouded in mystery (and liquid nitrogen vapors!) has captured the attention of the public through mainstream news/articles on tissue engineering, biobanking, cellular-gene therapy, artificial organs, tissue-organ transplantation, regenerative medicine, and precision-personalized medicine. With this diverse range of applications and growing public acknowledgement, this is an exciting time for the field, its scientists and end users, and the Society for Cryobiology.

Lastly, I must thank you, our members for electing me to the position of President and allowing me the opportunity to lead the Society for Cryobiology. As each President builds upon the momentum of his predecessor, I trust I leave the Society healthy, strong, and resilient for new incoming President, Dr. Adam Higgins, who takes the reins 2020-2021. 

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! 

Cheers,

Dayong Gao, Ph.D
President,
Society for Cryobiology
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British Woman Survives 6 Hours After Cardiac Arrest

A recent hiking trip turned frigid after thirty-four-year-old Audrey Schoeman and her husband Rohan got caught in a snowstorm in the Pyrenees mountain range, Spain. Rohan called emergency services after Schoeman passed out. 

Dr. Jordi Riera and the team at Vall d'Hebron explained that Schoeman's extreme and rapid cooling to 18°C, causing her cardiac arrest, also slowed her brain metabolism which allowed the organs to better cope with the lack of oxygen. The team used an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine to keep her alive. Warming up slowly, Schoeman regained consciousness 6 hours after her cardiac arrest. Despite some loss of sensitivity in her hands, Schoeman has made a full recovery and returned home. Read the full article. 

This "miracle" is the sort of biological phenomenon the team at the University of Maryland is attempting to duplicate with acute trauma victims. Read more...




First HIV Positive Sperm Bank Opened

Just before World Aids Day on December 1st, New Zealand just became the first country to establish a sperm bank called Sperm Positive for HIV positive donors who have a consistently undetectable viral load. Damien Rule-Neal, one of the first donors, said: "I want people to know life doesn't stop after being diagnosed with HIV and that it is safe to have children if you're on treatment." Read the full article HERE.

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First Human Placed in Suspended Animation

A team of medics at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine have announced their first attempt at placing a human in suspended animation. The Federal Drug Administration approved the team for 10 trials where a patient will be rapidly cooled to 10-15 °C by replacing their blood with ice-cold saline, ceasing nearly all brain activity. Hypothetically, medical professionals then have up to 2 hours to operate before the "suspended" patient is rewarmed and their heart started again. The team's trial procedure officially called Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR), is only allowed to be trialed on acute trauma victims (i.e. gunshot or stab wounds) who have already suffered cardiac arrest and have less than a 5% survival rate.
Read the full article HERE.

Election Results

The results are in from the 2019 Election, and we are pleased to notify members of the following results: 



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CRYO2019 Plenary Speakers in the News

CRYO2019 Plenary speakers Bart Panis and Oliver Ryder have featured in a recent news article by Katharine Gammon, a freelance science writer in California, who attended CRYO2019 as our guest. Ryder, the director of the "Frozen Zoo", presented on the continuous efforts made by the San Diego zoo to cryopreserve genetic material from over 10,000 species. Panis, a senior researcher with the Leuven, Bioversity International, discussed with Gammon the massive ice cave-turned-seed bank, Svalbard seed vault, with its 820,000 seed samples and the challenges surrounding flora cryopreservation. Read the full article HERE

Organ Transplant Survival Rate to Triple

Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School began supercooling rat livers 5 years ago with the intention of being able to preserve human organs for more than the current 9 hours. Society for Cryobiology members, Reinier de Vries and Korkut Uygun, contributed to the research team's current experiment on human livers that were unsuitable for transplants. The research team's ultimate goal is a true organ bank where organs can be preserved for years instead of hours or days and in essence, eliminate the hundreds of deaths that occur while patients wait for a suitable transplant. Read the full article HERE.

Death of Igor Katkov

Igor KatkovIt is with sadness that we must inform members and the wider cryobiology community of the sudden and unexpected death of Prof. Igor Katkov in early September 2019. At the time of his death Prof. Katkov was serving a term as Governor on the Society for Cryobiology's Board. 

Prof. Katkov received his education as a Biophysicist in the former “Cryobiological Capital of the World” Kharkov, Ukraine (to use Igor's wording). After completing his PhD on the correlation between the tolerance of bovine sperm to electroporation and freezing, Prof. Katkov undertook a post-doctoral fellowship with Peter Mazur at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1996-1998), researching osmotic and cryotolerance of mouse sperm. He then went on to work with Victor Bronshtein in San Diego, researching high temperature vitrification by drying without lyophilization. 

From 2001 - 2007 he worked at the University of California, San Diego (department of Pediatrics), developing a technique of freezing adherent pluripotent stem cells directly in multi-well dishes. During this time he developed a novel Relativistic Permeability approach, which calculates the exact level of maximum shrinkage during freezing and swelling during dilution. He was the first person to show that a permeable solute may behave paradoxically and have a bi-phasic pattern: moving in and then out during addition (hypersaturation effect) and out and back in the cell during dilution (hyperdiliution effect). In 2001 Prof. Katkov also founded Celltronix and served as Chief Scientific Officer, and from 2015 he combined this with the role of Head of the Laboratory of Amorphous State at Belgorod University (Russia) - serving in both roles until his death. Prof. Katkov’s most recent work has been the development of the concept of and building equipment for kinetic vitrification by hyperfast cooling, namely designing the K-VF KrioBlast™ in cooperation with V. F. Bolyukh from Ukraine.

In 2012 Prof. Katkov edited Current Frontiers in Cryobiology and Current Frontiers in Cryopreservation, the first major update to cryobiology literature since the publication of Life in the Frozen State (2004). During his career he published more than 160 research articles, and was granted 5 patents in the United States and Russia. 

To send a message of condolence please contact Nicole Evans who will pass all messages on to Prof. Katkov's family.

Death of David Pegg

It is with sadness we have to pass on news of the recent death of Prof. David Pegg at his home in York, United Kingdom on Saturday August 3, 2019. He was 86 years old.

Prof. Pegg completed a Bachelor of Science and Medical Degree at the University of London in 1956, and followed this with a Doctorate in Medicine in 1963 from the same institution. The early part of his career was spent at Westminster Medical School in Clinical and Lecturing posts, before spending the major part of his career based in Cambridge at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Clinical Research Centre (1968 - 1978) and then as Head of the MRC Medical Cryobiology Group (1978 - 1992). Prof. Pegg then moved to York, as Director of the Medical Cryobiology Unit at the University of York. Prof. Pegg was an advisor to the UK's National Blood Service, Department of Health, and Human Embryology and Fertilization Authority. He also served as Chairman of the Society for Low Temperature Biology, Prof. Pegg trained a number of prominent British and international cryobiologists, including former Associate Editor of Cryobiology, W. John Armitage (University of Bristol), Barry Fuller (University College London/Royal Free Hospital), Mike Taylor (Sylvatica Biotech/Carnegie Mellon University).

Prof. Pegg is well-known as a great cryobiologist who made outstanding contributions to the science of cryobiology and to the Society for Cryobiology. He was a founding member of the Society for Cryobiology and served the Society as President (1974-1975), Governor (several terms), and Editor-in-Chief of Cryobiology (1994 - 2011). He was elected as a Fellow of the Society for Cryobiology in 2005. Prof. Pegg's primary research interests focused on tissue and organ cryopreservation. Recent research projects had included work on corneas, cartilage, blood vessels, cardiac valves, and tissue-engineered graft materials. He was interested in not only the fundamental mechanism of freezing injury, but also the development of novel cryopreservation techniques and their clinical applications. He authored and/or edited six books and more than 200 journal papers in the field of cryobiology.

A memorial ceremony in celebration of Prof. Pegg's life will take place on Thursday 29th August in York, UK. 

Sincerely, 
Nicole Evans, Executive Director
Dayong Gao, President 

Society for Cryobiology

New Administrator Announced

The Society for Cryobiology is pleased to announce that we have employed a new administrator - Amelia Hanson. She has an education in chemical engineering and experience in the Houston oil & gas industry. A native Texan, Amelia now lives in New Zealand as a technical writer and website designer. Working directly with the society's Executive Director, Nicole Evans, Amelia assumed the position of administrator February 27th, 2019. You can contact her at [email protected].

Program Committee Track Co-Chair for Plant Cryobiotechnology at CRYO2019

Gayle VolkGayle Volk, a CRYO2019 Program Committee Track Co-Chair for Plant Cryobiotechnology, has recently been in the news about a study into heritage apple cultivars in Wyoming, USA. Samples from Heritage apples, planted in the 1800s, were collected from nearly a hundred farms, orchards, or homesteads and are being studied to determine existing traits that allow these trees to survive, even thrive, in the harsh, cold Wyoming climate. 

The original article can be found HERE

New UCL and Royal Free Ovarian Tissue Bank

New UCL and Royal Free Ovarian Tissue Bank

University College London (UCL) and the Royal Free London Hospital have announced a new ovarian tissue bank to preserve the fertility of girls and women about to undergo treatment for cancer. 

The publically funded initiative will be led by UCL academic Dr. Paul Hardiman (UCL Institute of Women's Health) and consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology at the Royal Free Hospital in London, with consultation by Society for Cryobiology Fellow, Prof. Barry Fuller, head of research for the UCL Division of Surgery, and  Prof. Mark Lowdell, UCL director of Cellular Therapeutics.

Worldwide there have been approximately 100 live births following ovarian tissue preservation and subsequent reimplantation on the remaining ovary or into the lining of the abdominal cavity. 

Dr. Hardiman, tissue bank director, said: 
“We have modelled our protocols on how it is done at the Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, one of the largest hospitals in Denmark, where they have been freezing human ovarian tissue since 1999. This is a well-established method in Europe, the US and Japan but the UK has lagged behind and patients often faced having to go abroad and pay to receive this treatment. At a time when patients need to concentrate on life-saving therapies this intervention needs to take place as quickly as possible.”

“What makes the Royal Free London so ideally suited to provide this service is that we have a unique mix of facilities and expertise in tissue freezing and cell therapy including Professor Barry Fuller, head of research for the UCL Division of Surgery and Interventional Science and Professor Mark Lowdell, director of Cellular Therapeutics.  We are also a leading kidney and liver transplant centre and the principle UK centre for cell and tissue medicines which has helped facilitate approval from the Human Tissue Authority. We are very grateful for the support from the Royal Free Charity over the past seven years which funded Natalie Getreu*, a PhD student, who played an important role in enabling us to bring this to patients.”

*Society for Cryobiology student member, Natalie Getreu, presented her PhD research for the Ovarian Tissue Bank at CRYO2017 and CRYO2016. 









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John Armitage Awarded OBE

W. John Armitage named Officer of the British Empire (OBE) 

John-ArmitageProf. W. John Armitage has recently been awarded an OBE for services to corneal transplantation in the Queen's New Year Honours list. 

John is the Head of Research and Development for Ocular Tissue, NHS Blood and Transplant, Emeritus Professor, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, and former Director of Bristol Tissue Bank, which comprised the Bristol Eye Bank and Bristol Heart Valve Bank. 

John completed his PhD in cardiac cryopreservation and research posts in Cambridge, UK and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, before joining the Department of Opthamology in Bristol, UK, where he set up the Bristol Eye Bank to carry out research into corneal preservation.

The Bristol Eye Bank, one of the largest eye banks in Europe, is home to the UK's Corneal Transplant Service (CTS), which provides corneas to hospitals across the UK. Since 1986 the CTS has provided corneal transplants for over 70,000 patients through the UK's National Health Service (NHS). Although funded by the NHS, management of the eye bank remained at Bristol until 2015, at which time it was transferred to the National Health Service Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), the public body overseeing all blood, organ, and tissue transplants in the UK. 

One of the major breakthroughs of the CTS was the introduction of 34°C (93°F) organ culture storage, which extended the life of transplants from a few days, to approximately four weeks. This transformed the face of corneal transplantation in the UK by improving logistics and supply, allowing transplants to be scheduled weeks in advance, as opposed to emergency surgery.  

Speaking of his award, John said,  "I am delighted to have my work recognised in this way, which also reflects the significant impact of the work of the Bristol Eye Bank and acknowledges the collective effort of NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) and Bristol University staff, ophthalmology colleagues in Bristol Eye Hospital and hospitals throughout the UK, and the support of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists. However, above all, it is the thoughtfulness and generosity of the families of eye donors, without whom corneal transplantation would not be possible, that truly merit the thanks of patients and their doctors."

John is the current President of the European Eye Bank Association, of which he was a founding member, Associate Editor of Cryobiology, and a long time member and former Governor of the Society for Cryobiology. 

New Website Launch

New Website Launch 

The Society for Cryobiology is pleased to announce the launch of their brand new website. 

New Features

  • Completely Updated Template - Mobile responsive template with a fresh, modern feel.
  • Integrated Payment Gateway - Say goodbye to Paypal. You'll now stay on the Society's site while you check out using your credit or debit card. 
  • Automated Dues Invoicing - Dues renewal notices will be triggered automatically with each member receiving a customized invoice to pay online. Simply click the button in your email, and pay online with your credit card. 
  • Updated Membership Form - Apply or renew using the same form, with advanced field logic permissioning fields to appropriate applicants/users only. 
  • New Job Board - The Society has partnered with JobBoard.io who offer special pricing to Associations. Post your job on the Society's Job Board only, or push it out to the entire Zip Recruiter network. The choices is yours. 
  • Brand New Member Directory - Logged in members can search for members, or view the entire directory (members must opt in to the directory to be viewable).
  • Updated and Revised Members' Area - Stay tuned as we add more members' only content over the coming year. 
  • New 'Industry' Menu Item - A call to action for industry professionals to get involved with the Society by supporting our Annual Meeting
  • New 'Resources' Menu Item - New pages include 'Position Statements', 'Scientific Partners', and a soon to be added Press Release page. 
  • Sponsor Widget - We can now recognize the sponsors of our Annual Meeting using a sponsor advertisement which will appear in the sidebar, or at the bottom of your screen. 
  • Donation Widget - A high visibility call to action asking site visitors to donate to the Society. 
  • Upgraded Events Calendar - Now dynamically displays event name, date and location in an automatically generated events calendar. 

Election Winners

2018 Election Winners 

Congratulations to the Society for Cryobiology 2018 election winners for Governor:

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New Website Consultation

New Website Consultation

Keep Calm

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Volunteers Required! 

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