Adam Higgins
Oregon State University, OR·Biomedical Engineering
Donated organs survive only hours outside the body, so many go unused and transplant teams must race to match and schedule patients. Freezing organs for long-term storage could change this, but ice crystals destroy tissue.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Chemistry
- Topics
cryopreservation
cryoprotective agents
organ preservation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Screen chemicals for high cell membrane permeability and low toxicity, combining high throughput experiments with machine learning virtual screening to find new candidate cryoprotective agents (CPAs).
- Identify pairs of CPAs that are less toxic together than alone by comparing binary mixtures with single-CPA solutions in high throughput experiments, and train a model to predict mixture toxicity.
- Measure the glass-forming ability of CPA mixtures, the concentration needed to cool into a solid without ice, using a high throughput approach.
- Optimize CPA mixtures for organ cryopreservation through repeated cycles of mathematical optimization, high throughput testing and model retraining, seeking compositions that prevent ice with minimal toxicity.
More about the research
Cryoprotective agents (CPAs), chemicals that prevent ice formation, can help, yet the ones available today are toxic at the concentrations needed. Research has focused on fewer than 10 of the roughly 40 molecules tested as CPAs, even though millions of candidate molecules exist.
Why it matters
Demand for transplant organs far exceeds supply, partly because organs cannot be stored long and many donated organs are discarded. Less toxic cryoprotectant mixtures could one day allow organs to be stored for much longer. That could mean fewer discarded organs, better immune matching between donor and recipient, less chronic rejection, and more flexible surgery scheduling for transplant patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Juan Hu
San Diego State University, CA·Chemistry·Early-career
Screen DNA-encoded combinatorial libraries, in which each compound carries an identifying DNA barcode, with a droplet-scale permeation assay to find cyclic peptides that efficiently cross membrane bilayers.
Steven Van Lanen
University of Kentucky, KY·Pharmacology
Develop and run virtual screens — target-based, pharmacophore-based and machine-learning-based — to prioritize compounds for center projects before any laboratory testing.
Anh Ngo
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Materials Science
Characterize the solvation structure of liquid battery electrolytes, meaning how molecules arrange around each ion, across many compositions and concentrations using high-throughput multimodal measurements.
The school
Oregon State University: 29 labs on PI Pages, $372M a year on research, 238 research doctorates a year.
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