UMN ME Postdoc Featured on Front Cover of Cold Facts, Cryogenic Society of America

Dr. Lakshya Gangwar, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Bio-Heat and Mass Transfer Laboratory, and a former graduate student under Prof. John Bischof in ME at the University of Minnesota, has been featured on the front cover of the November 2025 issue of Cold Facts, the magazine of the Cryogenic Society of America.

Dr. Gangwar is the lead author of a groundbreaking study published in Nature Communications that presents the first physical proof that human-size organ samples can be successfully cryopreserved using vitrification and nanowarming technology.

This research marks a major milestone toward making human organ banking a reality. The team overcame decades-long challenges of ice formation and fracturing by demonstrating that large volumes—up to three liters of cryoprotective agents (CPAs) and even a whole porcine liver—could be cooled into a stable, glass-like state.

Dr. Gangwar and his colleagues also showed that a custom-designed 120 kW radiofrequency (RF) coil (housed in ME 255) could rapidly and uniformly “nanowarm” these liter-scale samples from within, a crucial step for organ revival.

This work, which is part of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Advanced Technologies for the Preservation of Biological Systems (ATP-Bio), proves that the core physical obstacles to long-term organ storage can be overcome at human-relevant scales, potentially leading to a paradigm shift in organ transplantation.