The International Polymer Colloid Group (IPCG) was founded in 1972 as a global forum for the exchange of ideas and emerging research activities for scientists and engineers from both academia and industry who study or use polymer colloids.

It is a vibrant scientific international community who normally meet face-to-face every two years to discuss the latest global developments related to polymer colloid science (2013 Shanghai, 2015 New Hampshire, 2017 the Basque Country, 2019 Singapore).

As a result of the global COVID19 pandemic, prof. dr. ir. Stefan Bon came up with the idea to take the IPCG forum online with a series of weekly scientific webinars, called the i-PCG 2020 Webinars. Anyone who is interested in science can participate as audience member, or even better, as presenter. Expect to interact with the world top in polymer colloid, with expert participants from industry, academia and enthusiasts. All is free.

Freezing cells made safer thanks to new polymer made at University of Warwick

- A new polymer that’s a cryoprotectant dramatically improves the freezing of cells has been discovered by researchers at the University of Warwick

- The new polymers can reduce the amount of organic solvent required in cryopreservation (freezing cells) as well as giving more and healthier cells after thawing

- Findings may help reduce cost and improve distribution of cells for cell-based therapies, diagnostics and research

Cell freezing (cryopreservation) – which is essential in cell transfusions as well as basic biomedical research – can be dramatically improved using a new polymeric cryoprotectant, discovered at the University of Warwick, which reduces the amount of ‘anti-freeze’ needed to protect cells.

The ability to freeze and store cells for cell-based therapies and research has taken a step forward in the paper ‘A synthetically scalable poly(ampholyte) which dramatically Enhances Cellular Cryopreservation.’ published by the University of Warwick’s Department of Chemistry and Medical School in the journal Biomacromolecules. The new polymer material protects the cells during freezing, leading to more cells being recovered and less solvent-based antifreeze being required.

Cryopreservation of cells is an essential process, enabling banking and distribution of cells, which would otherwise degrade. The current methods rely on adding traditional ‘antifreezes’ to the cells to protect them from the cold stress, but not all the cells are recovered and it is desirable to lower the amount of solvent added.

The new Warwick material was shown to allow cryopreservation using less solvent. In particular, the material was very potent at protecting cell monolayers – cells which are attached to a surface, which is the format of how they are grown and used in most biomedical research.

Having more, and better quality cells, is crucial not just for their use in medicine, but to improve the quality and accessibility of cells for the discovery of new drugs for example.

Cell-based therapies are emerging as the “fourth pillar” of chemo-therapy. New methods to help distribute and bank these cells will help make them more accessible and speed up their roll-out, and this new material may aid this process.

Professor Matthew Gibson who holds a joint appointment between the Department of Chemistry and Warwick Medical School comments:

“Cryopreservation is fundamental to so much modern bioscience and medicine, but we urgently need better methods to meet the needs of advanced cell-based therapies. Our new material is easy to scale up, which is essential if this is to be widely used, and we found it to be very protective for several cell lines. The simplicity of our approach will hopefully help us translate this to real applications quickly, and make an impact in healthcare and basic research.”

ENDS

29 JULY 2019

NOTES TO EDITORS

High-res image available at:

https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/july2019/mg_cells.jpg

Credit: University of Warwick. Caption: The cells frozen with the polymer (left) and without the polymer (right)

Paper available to view at: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.biomac.9b00681

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

Alice Scott
Media Relations Manager – Science
University of Warwick
Tel: +44 (0) 2476 574 255 or +44 (0) 7920 531 221
E-mail: alice.j.scott@warwick.ac.uk

Two virtual reality videos have been released for this month's Stand Up To Cancer event which showcase research from the University of Warwick and are narrated by actress Olivia Colman and Stephen Fry.

Scientists at Warwick University have discovered an incredible new way of administering chemotherapy drugs which is more effective and safer for the patient.

Stand Up To Cancer is a joint fundraising campaign from Cancer Research UK and Channel 4, which aims to accelerate ground-breaking research, like that being done in Coventry, in order to save lives.

We are pleased to announce Ezat Khoshdel has been appointed as an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the department. Ezat has been a long-standing collaborator with the department with multiple projects over 25 years. Ezat has recently retired from Unilever where he was the inventor of over 150 patents, the largest number of any Unilever employee. Ezat will be more than happy to discuss ideas and work across the department and add to our impact activities. Ezat can be contacted on E.Khoshdel@warwick.ac.uk and will next be in the department on October 11^th when he gives a lecture to our new Polymer MSc cohort.

Dr Gabit Nurumbetov, Principal Scientist at Medherant Ltd - a spin-out of the University of Warwick which produces next-generation drug delivery patches - has invented a revolutionary device for testing transdermal drugs more quickly, efficiently and accurately. Dr Nurumbetov completed his PhD in the Department of Chemistry with Professor Stefan Bon then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Professor David Haddleton’s group.

https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/warwick_grad_invents

The GibsonGroup report in Angewandte Chemie a new macromolecular ‘antifreeze’ which improves the cryopreservation of cells

A collaboration between the Fox, Scott and Gibson groups has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The team were inspired by how small helical antifreeze proteins in Nature enable extreomophiles to survive low temperatures, where other species would not survive. Rather than using traditional peptide/protein chemistry, the team used self-assembled metallohelicates which have similar dimensions to a small alpha helix, and found some which were remarkably potent at stopping ice crystal growth ; a major technological challenge in applications from wind farms, to aircraft to cryopreservation. Modelling studies showed that the underlying activity could be linked the patches of hydrophobicity (water liking) and hydrophobicity (water hating).

Read the paper here

Antifreeze Protein Mimetic Metallohelices with Potent Ice Recrystallization Inhibition Activity