X-Message-Number: 14058 From: "Brian Wowk" <> Subject: 21CM ice blockers Date: Sun, 9 Jul 2000 20:53:54 -0700 "Scott Badger" <> wrote: > I was interested, however, in whether any real interest > has been exhibited by cryobiologists in the X-1000 Ice Blocker created by > 21CM. I thought this was a tremendous breakthrough, yet I've heard > virtually nothing more about it except within the confines of the cryonics > community. Has this been a successful product for 21CM in the broader > market? 21st Century Medicine, Inc.'s "X-1000" ice blocker is indeed a breakthrough for cryopreservation by vitrification. However 95% of cryobiology deals with cryopreservation of isolated cells, an application for which vitrification is not particularly advantageous. Vitrification is only used commercially in a small sector of the agricultural embryo preservation market-- so small, in fact, that a neighbor of mine who works in the field of agricultural cryopreservation had never even heard of vitrification! The greatest commercial potential of vitrification lies in the quest to preserve complex tissues (donated and engineered tissues) for human transplant. This is an active research field in cryobiology, including in our own lab where we are agressively pursuing technology for banking of kidneys for transplant. Up until very recently, the only exposure of the cryobiology community to our breakthrough was a single ten-minute talk I gave at last year's Society for Cryobiology meeting. Subsequent to this talk, we developed two outside collaborations with other vitrification labs to explore the properties and potential of X-1000 for broader applications in the tissue banking field. A full-length paper on X-1000 was just published in the latest issue of the journal, Cryobiology. There will also be three presentations involving 21CM ice blockers at this summer's Society for Cryobiology meeting. On the strength of our data, we hope to entice still more labs to work with us to develop commerical applications, including labs that work in the field of agricultural embryo cryopreservation, which is perhaps the most immediate commercial opportunity available. In short, there is no "broad market" for 21CM ice blockers because there is as yet no broad market for vitrification. The market must be created, which we and others are busy doing. Synthetic ice blockers are to cryobiology what the laser was in the 1960's-- a scientifically fascinating phenomenon, but "a solution in search of a problem" for a number of years. Lasers are now of course ubiquitous. I could comment on potential applications of ice blockers outside of cryobiology, but that might jeopardize some publications we have pending. Brian Wowk 21st Century Medicine, Inc. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14058