When it comes to organ donation, time is everything - and by 'everything,' we mean the difference between a life-saving transplant and a very expensive cooler of spoiled meat. As soon as an organ is removed, it starts to deteriorate, and surgeons have only hours to get it into a recipient. Typically, organs are kept on ice at around 4 °C (39 °F), but freezing them is out of the question because ice formation wreaks havoc.
Enter Matthew Powell Palm at Texas A&M University and his team, who have devised a device that cools organs to -4 °C (25 °F) without forming ice. In new research with pig kidneys, they've shown that these supercooled organs can be preserved for days, and once rewarmed and transplanted, they outperform kidneys kept on ice. Kevin Myer, president and CEO of LifeGift, called it 'a landmark achievement' - and he's not even on the payroll.
Here's why this matters: Over 104,000 people in the US are waiting for a kidney transplant, and 17 die daily while waiting. Part of the problem is that donated kidneys often don't make it in time - about one in three gets discarded because they degrade within the 24-hour ice storage window. Supercooling could extend that to 72 hours or more, giving doctors time to match organs, transport them, and maybe even ship them internationally in the back of a Kia Sorento (yes, they tested that).
Powell Palm's device is essentially a high-tech thermos: a sealed chamber with transparent lid, a temperature monitor, and ice-detection sensor. Organs are submerged in a standard preservation solution. 'I always describe this as low-tech high science,' he says. The team removed pig kidneys, stored them supercooled for 24, 48, or 72 hours, then transplanted them back into the original pigs (after removing the other kidney, because science is cruel). The supercooled kidneys started producing urine immediately and functioned normally within about 10 days - faster than kidneys kept on ice for 24 hours. Even at three days, recovery was quicker than the gold standard of the last three decades, says Powell Palm: 'We're really, really pumped about this.'
Transplant surgeon Heidi Yeh of Mass General Brigham for Children, who also researches organ preservation, called it 'impressive,' noting that kidneys stored for 48 hours in other studies often take weeks to restart. The supercooled kidneys also grew with the pigs over 30 days, almost doubling in size, and one monitored for 200 days looked healthy. The team presented their findings at the American Transplant Congress in Boston last month.
Earlier this year, Canadian researchers cooled pig kidneys below zero with a cryoprotectant and stored them for up to 48 hours, but those organs only survived a week. Powell Palm's team has now stored kidneys for 72 hours and shown good function for 30 days or more - 'the first time this has ever been reported in history,' he says. They think they can go even longer: preliminary studies suggest 120-hour storage is feasible, though those kidneys haven't been transplanted yet.
Because the process uses no cryoprotective chemicals, the team hopes for accelerated FDA approval to test in humans. The device is simple and compact - stable enough to survive a cross-country trip in a Kia Sorento, which Powell Palm considers 'an even higher bar' than air travel. He and colleague Sebastian Giwa plan to launch a company in the coming months to develop the technology and other protocols that 'stop biological time.' Because if you can stop time, why not use it to save lives?