Breakthrough: Cryogenically preserved organ was successfully retransplanted

A breakthrough study was recently performed in the Plastic Surgery Lab at Ichilov Medical Center. For the first time ever, Israeli researchers have successfully retransplanted cryogenically preserved composite and whole limbs of rodents. The Researchers used two techniques to prove the vitality of specimens following cryopreservation and re-warming for retransplantation of limb tissue – slow freezing and vitrification, throughout the duration of the study.

This is the first successful attempt in the world at cryopreservation and retransplantation of a whole, composite limb. This breakthrough is resonating and creating a lot of buzz within the medical community, as the success of the study may be a basis for the development of novel technology for preserving composite tissue, limbs and even whole organs for future transplants.

Worldwide, many hand and face allotransplants have been performed in recent years and have proven the immense potential for improving quality of life inherent in these types of surgeries. However, due to their limited availability and prerequisite of prolonged immunosuppression therapy for the purpose of preventing graft rejection such as seen in other types of transplant procedures, their implementation remains inadequate to meet the demands of health services. Furthermore, significant difficulties are encountered while waiting for a transplant organ.

Long term preservation of limbs for transplants, a type of “organ bank” – may improve the availability of aesthetically and functionally matching limbs, and may indeed improve doctors’ ability to immunologically match tissues between the donor and the transplant recipient. This study is the first step towards realizing this vision.

Prof. Eyal Gur, Head of the Department of Plastic Surgery at Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv explains, “The need to replace “similar with similar” is the guiding principal plastic surgeons go by when contemplating which type of reconstruction surgery is the most appropriate for their patients. Therefore, when we talk about composite deficits of various body regions, autologous tissue grafts can be microsurgically replanted to the necessary areas. For example, skin and fat tissue from the abdomen may be used to create a breast for breast reconstruction surgery.  These types of surgeries are performed at our institution on a daily basis; however, we still lack ideal solutions for larger, composite deficits, such as hand and face reconstructions”.

For the purpose of advancing innovative solutions for the problem of complex reconstructions of whole organs, such as hands and faces, Prof. Amir Erev, a world-renowned cryobiologist, has developed a method for slow-freezing of organs, which enables preservation of composite organs. Despite the immense challenge of preserving a composite organ composed of several different tissues (bone, muscle, nerves and fat), researchers at the hospital, using Dr. Erev’s unique cryopreservation technique, have successfully proven the vitality of a limb following the process of freezing, cryopreservation, rewarming and retransplantation to a rodent.