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.

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.

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. 

Springboarding off the research done to preserve female's fertility before cancer treatments, researchers are now applying the same techniques to women in an attempt to postpone menopause. Researchers remove an ovarian tissue sample, use cryopreservation to preserve the pre-menopausal tissue, and then, even decades later, thaw and graft the tissue back onto the body. This tissue can then restore the reduced hormones and delay menopause. Tissue samples from nine women are being preserved, ready to be used just as the women begin to enter menopause.

Of course the younger and healthier the original tissue sample, the more effective it will be in delaying menopause. A tissue sample from a 40-year-old woman is expected to delay menopause by only 5 years, but future women in their 20s may be able to postpone menopause or even extend their fertility window by 20 to 30 years. READ MORE...

We don't have to worry about our planetary passports quite yet. As a species, we're still "light years" away from space babies, but the  European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Vienna presented research that frozen sperm samples can still be viable after being subject to microgravity conditions.

Montserrat Boada, director of an embryology laboratory at Dexeus Mujer, a women's health center in Barcelona, Spain and a team of researchers tested the effects of altered on sperm samples using aerial abcroatics. Passenger air flight is no comparison to the conditions these 10 sperm samples underwent which included at least 20 parabolic maneuvers that exposed the samples to space-like gravity and gravity forces two to three times more than experienced on Earth.  Other obstacles to future space colonization would include conception, the effect of microgravity on respiratory and circular systems, and the unknown prenatal effect of zero-Gs. Read more HERE

Assemble Plus has opened its fourth call for access to infrastructure in Marine labs in Europe. 

The Assemble plus consortium has opened again the Transnational access competitive calls where any scientist can apply with a good, short idea and the A+ covers the expenses (travel, accommodation, research, equipment fees) of that project for 1 month in any of the marine stations in the consortium. Application is quite straightforward and very in touch with the team on the selected destination.

Visit the Assemble Plus website for more information about how to apply. 

The Society for Cryobiology, in partnership with the ISBER, is pleased to announce the launch of the Liquid Nitrogen-Based Cryogenic Storage of Specimens Best Practices Addendum to the ISBER Best Practices 4th Edition. "The new Liquid Nitrogen Best Practices Addendum will be a go-to resource for the growing number of repositories being asked to store cellular products being used in adoptive therapy research and manufacturing. We are grateful to the team of contributors who are world leaders, who have shared their expertise in building and managing facilities to support collections requiring sub-Tg (glass transition, -135°C) storage,” said David Lewandowski, President of ISBER.
The new ISBER Addendum and the ISBER Best Practices 4th Edition is available to download now.

The Royan Institute held their third cryobiology and biobanking symposium on February 27, 2019, in Tehran, Iran. The Royan Institute was established in 1991 as a public non-profit research institute for reproductive biomedicine and infertility treatments. Today Royan consists of three research institutes: 

Yale scientists managed to partially revive the brains of decapitated pigs by flooding the organ with oxygen-rich artificial blood. These researchers are quick to assure the public the brains did not show any signs of consciousness; instead, their experiment showed the possibility of limiting or reversing long term brain damage as blood stops circulating. The ability to restore cell function to the brain and slow the decay process in pig brains deceased 4 to 6 hours has the potential for extraordinary applications for stroke or Alzheimer victims. The entire article can be read HERE.

Russian and South Korean researchers have extracted liquid blood and urine samples from a 42,000-year-old foal preserved by the Siberian permafrost. Upon discovery in August 2018, the one to two-week-old foal showed no external damage with skin, tail, and hooves still intact with hair still present on portions of the body. The scientist's lofty goal is to clone the horse and revive the extinct Lenskaya horse breed to which this foal belongs. A viable DNA sample from the blood is required for any hope of cloning and the scientists currently have 20 unviable blood samples. However, they are confident and are actively searching for a suitable surrogate mare in anticipation of a successful clone. The full article can be found HERE.

Testicle tissue samples from the rhesus macaques are being used in new research to preserve the fertility of preadolescent boys with cancer. Kyle Orwig from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and his team, removed testicle tissue from 5 prepubescent monkeys. After the monkeys reached sexual maturity, the tissue was grafted back onto the monkey's back and scrotum and within 12 months all 5 monkeys were producing testosterone and sperm. The team used the sperm from one of the monkeys to successfully impregnate a female.

Prior to puberty, young boys don't develop sperm that can be preserved in the event of infertility, a common side effect of chemotherapy and radiation. By taking small testicle samples of these young boys, researchers hope to be able to preserve the fertility of these future cancer survivors. The original article can be found HERE. 

Gayle 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. 

Postdoc Position for Bull Semen Cryopreservation Optimization

The Benson Cryobiology laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan, in collaboration with SEMEX, Inc in Quebecc, is offering a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship to an applicant interested in using novel interdisciplinary techniques to optimize bull semen cryopreservation. The successful candidate will work towards bull semen cryopreservation media optimization by determining biophysical parameters, cryoprotectant toxicities, and toxicity minimizing agents. Then they will use these components in a novel way to determine optimal cryoprotectant media equilibration protocols leading to successful post thaw recovery. This interdisciplinary project combines basic sperm science with mathematical modeling and optimization in an applied setting with access to large donor, recipient, and data pools.

Qualifications:

'Apollo Program' of Organ Banking Announced

Did you know that for every ONE patient that receives a heart transplant in the USA, TEN hearts from organ donors are wasted because they cannot be transplanted in time?