美国哈佛医学院Korkut Uygun课题组近期研发出过冷技术可延长人体肝脏的保存时间。该项研究成果发表在2019年9月9日在线出版的《自然—生物技术》上。

研究人员建立了一种改进的过冷技术，通过在机器灌注期间降低冰晶形成，以及使用保护剂进行均质预处理，来避免人体肝脏的冻结。研究人员发现，人体肝脏可以通过过冷处理以及亚常温机械灌注在-4°C下储存，从而有效地将器官的离体寿命延长27小时。研究人员表明，过冷处理前后肝脏的存活率没有变化，过冷处理后的肝脏可以通过体外常温再灌注血液来承受模拟移植的压力。

研究人员表示，由于血管器官无法保存超过数小时，这导致了移植器官的稀缺。标准低温保存在4°C，这将肝脏保存期限限制在12小时以内。研究人员之前发现，-6°C的超低温无冰储存可以延长大鼠肝脏的活性保存。然而，由于体积依赖的随机冰形成，将超低温保存应用到人体器官本质上是受限的。

附：英文原文

Title: Supercooling extends preservation time of human livers

Author: Reinier J. de Vries, Shannon N. Tessier, Peony D. Banik, Sonal Nagpal, Stephanie E. J. Cronin, Sinan Ozer, Ehab O. A. Hafiz, Thomas M. van Gulik, Martin L. Yarmush, James F. Markmann, Mehmet Toner, Heidi Yeh, Korkut Uygun

Issue&Volume: 2019-09-09

Abstract: The inability to preserve vascular organs beyond several hours contributes to the scarcity of organs for transplantation. Standard hypothermic preservation at +4C (refs. 1,3) limits liver preservation to less than 12h. Our group previously showed that supercooled ice-free storage at 6C can extend viable preservation of rat livers. However, scaling supercooling preservation to human organs is intrinsically limited because of volume-dependent stochastic ice formation. Here, we describe an improved supercooling protocol that averts freezing of human livers by minimizing favorable sites of ice nucleation and homogeneous preconditioning with protective agents during machine perfusion. We show that human livers can be stored at 4C with supercooling followed by subnormothermic machine perfusion, effectively extending the ex vivo life of the organ by 27h. We show that viability of livers before and after supercooling is unchanged, and that after supercooling livers can withstand the stress of simulated transplantation by ex vivo normothermic reperfusion with blood. Preservation of human livers at subzero temperatures with ice-free supercooling extends ex vivo organ life.

DOI: 10.1038/s41587-019-0223-y

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-019-0223-y