A new era for transplants: Organs may soon survive frozen storage

Scientists at Texas A&M University say they’ve overcome one of cryopreservation’s longest-standing hurdles: freezing large organs without causing structural cracks. The work — recently publicized by SciTechDaily — describes a refined method of vitrification, a process that turns tissues into a glass-like state rather than an icy crystalline form, thereby avoiding the damage that ice crystals normally inflict on cells.

What underlies the improvement is a better understanding of 'glass transition temperature,' the critical threshold at which the cryoprotective solution solidifies. According to the researchers, raising this temperature significantly reduces the risk of cracking — a common cause of failure when trying to preserve large, complex organs.

For decades, organ preservation has mostly relied on cold-storage — keeping organs at near-freezing temperatures for hours at most. That narrow window severely limits how far and how long an organ can travel before transplant, contributing to the high discard rates of donated organs.

Because of this limitation, even when donor organs are available, timing and logistics often doom them to waste. The new approach could change that by enabling long-term storage and easier distribution, potentially expanding transplant availability worldwide. Experts believe that if organ vitrification can be reliably scaled, transplant waitlists — long a chronic issue in many countries — could shrink dramatically.

Beyond human transplants, the implications are broader still. The technique could benefit conservation biology, by preserving wildlife organs or tissues; it might help stabilize vaccines or biological samples; and it could even improve how we store delicate tissues or food with minimal degradation over time.

That said, challenges remain. Vitrification has long been successful at smaller scales — for cells, reproductive tissue, or small biopsies — but larger organs introduce complexity: structural heterogeneity, diffusion limits, and potential toxicity of cryoprotectant solutions. Previous attempts failed because even slight temperature imbalances during cooling or warming created cracks or killed tissue.

Still, the newly published study offers a promising path forward. By fine-tuning the composition of vitrification solutions and targeting glass transition thresholds, researchers say they’ve reduced the risk of cracking. It is a major stride toward making long-term organ banking feasible. As one expert summary puts it, cryopreservation may finally be transitioning from experimental cell/tissue storage toward practical, large-scale organ preservation — the sort of leap that could transform organ transplantation globally.