DEVELOPMENT OF NEW PEPTIDE-BASED NANOMATERIALS AS POTENTIAL TOOLS FOR CRYOPRESERVATION OF TISSUES AND ORGANS
type: CreativeWork
description: Transplant practise has improved life duration and quality of many patients. However, the worldwide need is not met yet due to the limited number of donor organs and the inefficient preservation methods, that hinder their long-term preservation. The main obstacle to achieve a successful cryopreservation is represented by the freezing and thawing processes needed to achieve cryogenic temperatures that can cause permanent and irreversible cellular damages. The solution to this issue may be found in nature, as several organisms living in extreme conditions produce specific proteins, termed antifreeze (glyco)proteins (AF(G)Ps), that are able to depress the freezing point of body fluids, control the ice crystal nucleation and inhibit their growth. In particular, the latter AFP property, the ice recrystallization inhibition (IRI), is highly desirable for new synthetic antifreeze materials as ice recrystallization during thawing is associated to cellular damage during cryopreservation. Therefore, one of the main challenges in biomedical research for organ transplantation is finding non-toxic and biocompatible antifreeze compounds that enable subzero storage and cryopreservation without causing tissue damage. As the synthesis of molecules to be used for cryopreservation represents an urgent need, in the last decades researchers have been extensively focused on it. Since the production of AF(G)Ps is expensive and presents several difficulties in its scale-up, and considering their potential cytotoxicity/immunogenicity and their tendency to denature, efforts have been focused on synthesising macromolecular cryoprotectant-polymers or minimising the AFP primary sequence through the synthesis of peptides or lastly, increasing the antifreeze activity through the exploitation of a multimeric approach, taking advantage from self-assembly processes or the simultaneous presentation of several ice binding motifs, that allows to reduce the concentration required for the effect. Althoug…
abstract: Transplant practise has improved life duration and quality of many patients. However, the worldwide need is not met yet due to the limited number of donor organs and the inefficient preservation methods, that hinder their long-term preservation. The main obstacle to achieve a successful cryopreservation is represented by the freezing and thawing processes needed to achieve cryogenic temperatures that can cause permanent and irreversible cellular damages. The solution to this issue may be found in nature, as several organisms living in extreme conditions produce specific proteins, termed antifreeze (glyco)proteins (AF(G)Ps), that are able to depress the freezing point of body fluids, control the ice crystal nucleation and inhibit their growth. In particular, the latter AFP property, the ice recrystallization inhibition (IRI), is highly desirable for new synthetic antifreeze materials as ice recrystallization during thawing is associated to cellular damage during cryopreservation. Therefore, one of the main challenges in biomedical research for organ transplantation is finding non-toxic and biocompatible antifreeze compounds that enable subzero storage and cryopreservation without causing tissue damage. As the synthesis of molecules to be used for cryopreservation represents an urgent need, in the last decades researchers have been extensively focused on it. Since the production of AF(G)Ps is expensive and presents several difficulties in its scale-up, and considering their potential cytotoxicity/immunogenicity and their tendency to denature, efforts have been focused on synthesising macromolecular cryoprotectant-polymers or minimising the AFP primary sequence through the synthesis of peptides or lastly, increasing the antifreeze activity through the exploitation of a multimeric approach, taking advantage from self-assembly processes or the simultaneous presentation of several ice binding motifs, that allows to reduce the concentration required for the effect. Althoug…
author: IMPRESARI, ELISA
language: eng
keywords: cryopreservation, AFP, peptide-based material, CuAAC, alpha-helix, Settore CHIM/06 - Chimica Organica
date published: 2023-03-27
date modified: 2026-07-27T20:19:10Z
provider: Università degli Studi di Milano
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Università degli Studi di Milano

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/2434/958857

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.13130/impresari-elisa_phd2023-03-27