Shear-thickening fluids for cryopreservation.

在再生和移植医学中，限制进展的一个瓶颈是组织工程构建物不能按需制造.冷冻保存的目的是克服这个问题，然而，虽然成功地实现了与细胞悬浮液，成功的规模扩大的构建体的大小已经是难以捉摸的。没有任何方法可以保护复杂的生物质免受液氮（-196 ° C）冷却和加热过程中遇到的严重压力。我们提出了一种新的方法，其中非牛顿，剪切增稠流体可以用来提高操作性能的低温保存。剪切增稠流体是其粘度随着剪切应力（例如振动）而增加的材料。通过正确的振动水平，材料可以立即从液体变成固体。我们认为这是一种有效的低温生物保鲜材料。在储存温度下，由于低温，材料将保持固体（玻璃化），剪切应力将停止。剪切增稠材料使该过程完全可逆。

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.