May 2020: CryoCrate LLC won a NIH SBIR phase I award for development of a novel cryopreservation system for large skin grafts without using any toxic and cell permeating cryoprotectant.

CryoCrate, collaborating with the School of Medicine of Univ. of Missouri at Columbia, won a NIH SBIR Phase I award for cryopreservation of skin grafts from NIAID. Skin allograft transplantations are currently utilized for numerous clinical applications. In such applications, donor tissues are now typically utilized as “expensive bandages”, i.e. for temporary coverage, thereby requiring painful and damaging follow-on autotransplantation procedures. With tremendously improved skin graft cryopreservation methods coupled with use of HLA matching based on artificial intelligence network, future tissue banking platforms can potentially provide grafts to be used as permanent and definitive treatment for patients, thereby bringing high impact to clinical applications and the healthcare industry. To achieve this goal, our InstaVitria^® system will be further modified and improved to possess the capability of processing large skin grafts. The long-term goal of this project is to establish a new type of skin banks to supply skin grafts globally.