Newswise — Today in Nature Biotechnology, 40+ world leaders across science and medicine published an article entitled "The promise of organ and tissue preservation to transform medicine" that outlines the need for a modern-day “Apollo Program” to “control biological time” for organs and tissues.
This is identified as one of the key challenges facing biomedicine today affecting millions of people each year worldwide by constraining the ability to treat patients for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, liver failure, and other leading causes of death. Implications for global health, the success of scientific research and drug discovery, healthcare expenditures, and national defense are profound.
Professor John Bischof, Ph.D. is the Director of Bioheat and Mass Transfer Lab at the University of Minnesota where he also is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Carl and Janet Kuhrmeyer Chair in Mechanical Engineering. Bischof is one of the only 20 Fellows of the International Society for Cryobiology and is a Founding Scientific Advisors to the Organ Preservation Alliance. He recently published on a key advance in deep cryogenic temperature preservation based on nanotechnology enabled electro-magnetic warming.
Sebastian Giwa, Ph.D. is lead author on the Nature Biotech paper calling for the "Apollo Program." He is the cofounder and chairman of each of the Organ Preservation Alliance, Sylvatica Biotech Inc (100% organ banking R&D focused company) and Ossium Health Inc (a stem cell and tissue bank). He is trained at Harvard Business School where he has named a Baker Scholar. Giwa was an enabler of the first global Organ Banking Summit at Stanford, the NSF funded Organ Banking Technology Roadmap, the White House Roundtable on Organ Banking and is the author of the peer-reviewed paper The Grand Challenges of Organ Banking.
To arrange an interview with Bischof and/or Giwa or take video in environments such as a during scientific cryo experiments, organ procurement (e.g. helicopter transport of organs) and/or a transplantation in an O.R., please contact Giwa at [email protected] or Rhonda Zurn at [email protected].
The University of Minnesota has a remote ReadyCam® broadcast studio available for use on campus. The studio enables experts to appear on live TV without traveling to a network studio. Equipped with broadcast lighting, fiber optic and satellite capabilities and a robotic camera, the studio is remotely controlled by VideoLink professionals who coordinate all aspects of the live shot.
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