{"id":615,"date":"2026-10-15T13:02:35","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T13:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=615"},"modified":"2026-10-15T13:02:37","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T13:02:37","slug":"they-froze-pig-kidneys-for-a-year-then-made-them-pee-minnesota-team-nanowarmed-organs-from-%e2%88%92150c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/?p=615","title":{"rendered":"THEY FROZE PIG KIDNEYS FOR A YEAR \u2014 THEN MADE THEM PEE! | Minnesota team nanowarmed organs from \u2212150\u00b0C"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Science just pulled a kidney out of a deep freeze and made it work again. University of Minnesota researchers report pig kidneys cooled to about <strong>\u2212150\u00b0C<\/strong>, banked for days, weeks \u2014 and in one case <strong>over a year<\/strong> \u2014 were rewarmed, pinked up with blood, and produced urine.<\/p>\n<p>MIT Technology Review\u2019s Jessica Hamzelou details the breakthrough shared as a bioRxiv preprint (not yet peer-reviewed). Transplant surgeon Erik Finger and bioengineer John Bischof\u2019s team vitrified the organs into a glass-like state with cryoprotectants, then infused iron-oxide nanoparticles. An electromagnetic field flips those particles to heat the organ evenly \u2014 nanowarming \u2014 so ice and cracks don\u2019t kill the tissue on the way back up.<\/p>\n<p>Pig kidneys are roughly human-sized (~100 grams vs. a rat kidney\u2019s ~1 gram), which is why this jump matters. Rewarmed kidneys on perfusion machines and in short pig transplants made urine within about a minute, though output ran around two-thirds of normal and cryoprotectant injury still showed. Finger walked out after the last transplant and called it \u201ca big deal.\u201d Outside experts called it a long-sought milestone toward indefinite organ banking.<\/p>\n<p>Today\u2019s transplant window is roughly 24\u201336 hours. A real freezer bank could flip the script: organs waiting for patients instead of patients dying on waitlists. Next hurdles: longer animal survival studies, less-toxic cryoprotectants, then human kidneys.<\/p>\n<p>One organ. One year in the ice. Urine on demand. The organ-bank future just stopped being sci-fi cosplay.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sources:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2026\/10\/15\/1146091\/pig-kidneys-that-were-frozen-for-a-year-have-been-brought-back-to-life\/\">MIT Technology Review \u2014 Pig kidneys frozen for a year brought back to life<\/a> \u00b7 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biorxiv.org\/content\/10.64898\/2026.10.07.756990v1\">bioRxiv preprint \u2014 Functional recovery of vitrified nanowarmed pig kidneys<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Minnesota team nanowarmed organs from \u2212150\u00b0C<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":610,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/bb-frozen-pig-kidneys-1015.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":616,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615\/revisions\/616"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugleblast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}