Shear-thickening fluids for cryopreservation.

在再生医学和移植医学中，限制进展的一个瓶颈是组织工程构建物不能按需制造。冷冻保存旨在克服这一问题，然而，尽管细胞悬液已取得成功，但成功扩大构建规模仍然遥遥无期。没有任何方法可以保护复杂的生物质在液氮(-196°C)降温和升温过程中遇到严重的压力。我们提出了一种新的方法，在这种方法中，可以使用非牛顿的剪切增稠流体来提高低温保存的操作性能。剪切增稠流体是粘度随剪切力增加而增加的物质，例如振动。在正确的振动水平下，这种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，剪切应力将停止，因为由于温度较低，材料将保持固体(玻璃化)。剪切增稠材料使这一过程完全可逆。

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.