Technology Solutions

In addition to creating custom vitrification and hypothermic solutions for customer specific applications, we have developed a family of solutions that include ice blocking agents, ice crystal suppression polymers and heart resuscitation solutions.

Natural and bio-artificial applications for our enabling platform technology include living tissue, organ and cell preservation for assisted reproduction, transplantation medicine, cell therapy and drug discovery and development. Our solutions are also suitable for biologistics use across a wide range of temperatures.

Commercially available solutions can be purchased for use under a simple research license and are available in quantities of 10 ml, 50 ml or 500 ml.

We would like to know how well our solutions work in your research application. Please contact us with questions or to let us know about your experience.

Meeting the Cryopreservation Challenge

21st Century Medicine is changing the rules of the cryopreservation game. Cryopreservation of living systems works primarily because of the existence of cryoprotective agents, which are chemicals that reduce the amount of ice that forms during freezing.

Cryoprotective agents, however, have their problems. They can be toxic and can cause osmotic damage if used incorrectly.

Although these problems can often be limited enough to achieve good cryopreservation of simple systems, they become more and more limiting as the system to be preserved becomes more and more complex. Until recently, there has been no way to escape from this fundamental limitation of cryobiology.

Now there is.

21st Century Medicine scientists have shown that it is possible to create solutions that are fantastically resistant to ice formation yet are also decidedly non-toxic. Even whole organs can now survive once lethal concentrations of cryoprotectants without damage. These solutions are finding applications in systems as simple as mammalian ova and as complex as whole mammalian organs.

The cryopreservation method that can be applied across diverse living systems with the greatest universality of success is vitrification. Vitrification avoids ice formation even at cryogenic temperatures. Unlike freezing—in which the optimum recovery that can be obtained is a balance between the damaging effects of cooling too slowly and the damaging effects of cooling too rapidly—vitrification generally does not require controlled cooling rates and is not sensitive to the cooling rate used over wide cooling rate ranges.

Although 21st Century Medicine therefore focuses mostly on vitrification as the cryopreservation method of choice for many systems, it is likely that our advanced formulas for vitrification can be used to produce better results after freezing and thawing as well.

Although low and non-toxic concentrations of common cryoprotectants are normally used for freeze-preservation, freezing removes pure liquid water from the solution as it crystallizes, thus concentrating all dissolved substances in the remaining unfrozen volume. As temperatures fall lower, the concentrations of cryoprotectants in and around frozen cells can rise to damaging levels. Therefore, freezing ultimately poses the same problems of cryoprotectant toxicity. By using dilute versions of our low-toxicity vitrification formulas for cell freezing, this problem can probably be reduced for many systems.