Shear-thickening fluids for cryopreservation.

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In regenerative and transplantation medicine medicine a bottleneck limiting progress is that tissue engineeredconstructs cannot be manufactured on demand. Cryopreservation aims to overcome this problem, howeverwhilst success has been achieved with cell suspensions, successful scale up of construct size has remainedelusive. No methods exist that can protect complex biomasses from the severe stress they encounter duringcooling and warming from liquid nitrogen (-196°C). We propose a new method, where non-Newtonian, shear-thickening fluids can be used to improve operational performance of cryopreservation. Shear thickening fluidsare materials whose viscosity increases with shear stress, for example vibration. With the correct level ofvibration, the material can change from a liquid to a solid instantly. We propose this as an effective material forextremely low temperature biological preservation. At the storage temperature, shear stress would be stoppedas the material would remain solid (vitrified) due to the low temperatures. The shear-thickening materialsmake the process completely reversible.