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Mrityunjay Kothari, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

In the U.S., approximately 17 patients die each day awaiting an organ transplant; a new person is added to the transplant list every eight minutes. Cryopreservation — storage at extremely low temperatures (-120° C to -160° C) — is the most promising path to long-term organ banking, yet it remains beyond our reach for large tissues and whole organs.

New research led by UNH aims to transform organ preservation by tackling a fundamental challenge to cryopreservation: the mechanical damage that occurs when tissues are frozen at ultra-low temperatures, limiting their long-term storage.

“The sci-fi stuff that we see in movies that allows humans to be preserved indefinitely? That is nowhere close to reality because the tissues and organs literally fracture when frozen,” says , assistant professor of mechanical engineering and author of a new study published in .

, along with UNH Ph.D. student Ali Saeedi and Ram Devireddy of Louisiana State University, developed a predictive model that is the first of its kind to give the cryobiologists a way to tell what freezing protocols will cause fracture, something that is currently done in an ad-hoc and time-consuming way. The framework is a powerful tool for understanding the fundamental mechanisms of freezing-induced injury — and for improving cryopreservation strategies.

“Being able to cryopreserve organs and tissues will completely transform human health, and this current work is a first step in that direction,” Kothari says.

Kothari was recently awarded funding from the U.S. Army Research Office to advance his work on phase separation in biological materials. Read more.