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A portion of the initial work will be done with blood and, if successful, the same approach could be applied to many other aspects of medicine such as organ donations or vaccines.

During transfusions, blood has to be rapidly cooled and stored at low temperatures to make sure it stays viable between the time it is donated and dispensed. That is difficult and costly to maintain because of storage restrictions and travel between collection and distribution locations. However, researchers at CU Boulder are exploring a new form of biostasis that could entirely eliminate the need for cooling, potentially revolutionizing combat medicine, organ donation, vaccines and even the way we treat disease altogether.

This new five-year, $7 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Army Research Office ($2,403,812 base plus options) is led by three CU faculty, including Distinguished Professors Christopher Bowman and Kristi Anseth in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Assistant Professor Sabrina Spencer in the Biochemistry Department at CU Boulder. Bowman and Anseth are also part of the Materials Science and Engineering program and all three are part of the BioFrontiers Institute as well. The work was originally supported by a seed grant from the Precision Biomaterials Interdisciplinary Research Theme in the College of Engineering and Applied Science which, as Bowman notes, “successfully enables these types of high risk, interdisciplinary efforts to address complex and important problems at the interfaces of traditional disciplines.” 

As the group outlines in the proposal, the strategy for making this happen is a completely new approach using a two sequential light-activated processes to first induce biostasis and then completely reverse it back to the active state. Bowman indicated that the idea was to fill the blood, or other targets, with monomers that first become a gelled polymer when exposed to one color of light – crowding every region of the cell in a manner that prevents any degradation of biological viability. When hit with a second color of light, the reaction would be reversed and normal biological activity would resume. 

Spencer said that “the hope is that the presence of the gelled polymer will stop all of the intracellular processes, including degradation, and preserve the sample just as if it were cooled.”

A portion of the initial work on this approach will be done with blood and, if successful, the same approach could be applied to many other aspects of medicine such as organ donations or vaccines which must be kept cold as well Bowman said.

Microscopy image showing uptake of fluorescently labeled polymers (red) into cells, dispersed in the nucleus (blue) and throughout the cytoplasm. Endosomes are shown in green.

“The ability to deliver a vaccine that does not require cold storage at any point or to put an organ for transplant into an extended period of stasis would represent a transformational approach to medicine with significant benefits throughout society and the world,” he said. “If this approach is successful, we would enable better potential treatment of disease, infections or traumatic wounds where buying time could be beneficial. If you could put human tissue or organs into stasis, you could change the way healthcare could be implemented altogether.”

Anseth said “the potential applications of creating a suspended animation-like stasis would be revolutionary in numerous areas of medicine, especially in places where cooling isn’t an available form of preservation.”

While the work may seem like science fiction, Bowman said there are several examples of living organisms or cells that go into a form of reversible stasis, generally triggered by low temperatures. These include cryopreservation prior to in vitro fertilization as well as spores and other single celled organisms that also exist in an inactive state for years before reactivating. More complex organisms such as tardigrades (also called water bears) and wood frogs are also able to undergo a type of reversible biostasis.

Still, Bowman said no one has controllably gone into a cell and done a reversible polymerization so far, noting the amount of interdisciplinary work that goes into a project like this.

“My group and the others we are working with are truly excited to explore this issue and its potential benefits over the next five years,” Bowman said. “We don’t know where the work will go, but we will learn a great deal along the way.”

Research was sponsored by the DARPA/Army Research Office and will be accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-19-2-0024. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the DARPA/Army Research Office or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation herein.