Professor Yarmush Receives Grant from NIH

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a four-year, $1.6 grant to Professor Martin Yarmush and Dr. Berk Usta from the Massachusetts General Hospital for an R01 project entitled “Deep Supercooling of Red Blood Cells: Towards Practical Long-Term Storage”.  The project aims to develop a cryopreservation approach for red blood cells based on a recently developed technology that allows stable supercooling of large volumes for long periods at temperatures well below −10 °C).  The research is based on surface sealing of aqueous solutions with water-immiscible hydrocarbon oils, which has the potential to extend the shelf life of RBCs to more than one hundred days.