KSEF R&D Excellence: Development of Novel Technology for Rapid and Uniform Warming of Cryopreserved Biomedical Material Using Single-mode Microwave Cavity

Cryopreservation of living cells and tissues is very important in the modem medicine and healthcare because it is indispensa~le. for (1) banking of a large quantity of cells and tissues for Ill..A typing and matching between the recIpIents and donors to meet the increased clinical needs in transplanations, or sometimes, urgent needs (e.g. in the war or in the events like "9.11" terrorist attack, or other accidents); (2) facilitating the transport of cells/tissues between different medical centers; and (3) allowing sufficient time for the screening of transmissible diseases (e.g. my) in the donated cells/tissues before transplantation. In addition, (4) more and more engineered tissues need to be successfully preserved before their practical use in medical applications and commercialization; and (5) cryopreservation of gametes and ovary tissues of endangered or transgenic animal species are urgently needed. Although cryopreservation has had a long history, most currently-used cryopreservation techniques have been developed empirically, and are often inadequate for preservation, usually resulting in highly variable and low cell-tissue survival rates. Furthermore, at the present time many cells and tissues/organs can not be cryopreserved using any empirically developed approaches (cells/tissues are damaged during the freezing/thawing process), which significantly limits clinical transplantation options. Thus there is an urgent need to understand the fundamental cryobiology and to develop new technology to prevent cells/tissues from cryoinjury. One of the critical factors influencing the cell/tissue survival is the warming process. Currently, almost all cryopreserved cells/tissues are warmed by the conventional, heat-convection method (e.g. in a stirred water bath). Due to the low thermal conductivity and high specific heat values of biological materials, this convective warming regime can only make a slow and non-uniform warming process (especially for the relatively large cell suspensions or tissues), which cause intracellular ice-recrystallization, devitrification, and thermal stress/fracture in the samples/tissues, causing cell and tissue injury. The objective of the proposed research is to develop a novel single-mode electromagnetic resonance technology/equipment to achieve rapid and uniform warming of cryopreserved cells/organs to prevent the cryoinjury (caused by the intracellular ice-recrystallization, devitrification, and fracture in the tissues). As a first step to achieve this objective, tissue phantoms will be used in this investigation.