Mass General Restores Pig Kidney After 10-Day Freeze, Extending Organ Storage Beyond Hours
Updated
Updated · spacedaily.com · Aug 29
Mass General Restores Pig Kidney After 10-Day Freeze, Extending Organ Storage Beyond Hours
2 articles · Updated · spacedaily.com · Aug 29
Summary
Ten days of high-subzero preservation were enough for a Mass General team to rewarm a pig kidney, transplant it into a living pig and restore kidney function.
The result used partial freezing—keeping the organ below 0°C with controlled ice present—rather than standard cold storage, which typically gives transplant teams only hours to use a donated organ.
Mass General researchers built the approach from wood frog freeze-tolerance biology, replacing toxic frog-level glucose with 3-O-methyl-D-glucose to protect mammalian tissue during deep cooling.
The kidney advance follows earlier milestones: 27-hour preservation of five human livers at -4°C in 2019 and five-day recovery of rat livers stored at -10°C to -15°C in 2022.
Longer storage could turn transplants from emergency races into planned logistics for the 100,000-plus people on U.S. waiting lists, where about 13 patients die each day before an organ arrives.