The quest to keep organs alive outside the body

This week, I covered a fascinating effort to preserve organs outside the body. There’s a huge shortage of donor organs, and one of the main reasons is time—they survive only a matter of hours outside the body, even when they’re kept on ice.

Doctors dream of organ banks—stores of human organs that can be preserved for days, weeks, months, or even longer. That would allow them to run tests on organs, find the best matches for them, and transport the organs to those recipients.

In new research, one team has been able to supercool the kidneys of pigs—animals whose organs are of a similar size to human ones—and preserve them for days. The kidneys survived being stored at −4 °C (25 °F) and eventually reimplanted back into pigs.

And that’s just the latest development in a field that is positively buzzing. It has proved super difficult to freeze organs.

Once ice forms in them, they’re done. The ice crystals create all kinds of damage and render the organs unusable.

That hasn’t stopped many researchers from trying. Some have focused on cryopreservation—rapid extreme cooling that essentially leaves cells in a glasslike state.

This process is now routine for eggs, sperm, and embryos, which ar

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  The quest to keep organs alive outside the body