X-Message-Number: 18401 From: "Jan Coetzee" <> Subject: First thawed transplant success Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 18:32:32 -0500 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_0098_01C1A43C.521FE6E0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_001_0099_01C1A43C.521FE6E0" ------=_NextPart_001_0099_01C1A43C.521FE6E0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" First thawed transplant successRat becomes pregnant from frozen ovaries. 24 January 2002 TOM CLARKE The heat is still on for fast fresh organ transplants. SPL Researchers have successfully transplanted ovaries that had been stored in liquid nitrogen from one female rat to another. Roger Gosden and colleagues at Notre-Dame Hospital in Montreal, Canada, are the first to demonstrate that entire organs can be safely stored and thawed1. One of the banes of the transplant surgeon is that rare donor organs cannot be frozen for later use. Ice crystals grow between cells, puncturing them and destroying fragile tissues. People in need of new organs must wait for fresh ones to be donated. Many die waiting when acceptable donors cannot be found. Gosden's team soaked fresh rat ovaries, with their fallopian tubes attached, in a protective solution. They then froze them slowly and stored them overnight in liquid nitrogen - a process called cryopreservation. Later, they thawed the organs and transplanted them into genetically identical rats, overcoming the problem of tissue rejection. ------=_NextPart_001_0099_01C1A43C.521FE6E0 Content-Type: text/html; [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18401