I took another look at the article in my opening post, and see now some parts that mention ex. "earlier research", ah. Let me paste below the middle of the article that is all you need to read and I'll highlight some areas too to pay attention to. Then below I'll summarize what this probably means and answer your question:
“The problem is that these chemicals can cause osmotic damage due to water crossing cell membranes and causing the cells to burst,” Higgins said. “They can also kill cells due to toxicity. So in designing the best vitrification method, the trick is choosing the best path between normal physiological conditions and a final vitrified state – i.e., high CPA concentration and liquid nitrogen temperature.”
Hence the need for mathematical modeling. In earlier research involving a single layer of endothelial cells, which make up the lining of the circulatory system, Higgins and colleagues in the College of Engineering showed the value of a model that involved CPA toxicity, osmotic damage and mass transfer. The modeling uncovered an approach for loading CPA that was counterintuitive: inducing cells to swell.
The researchers found that if cells were initially exposed to a low CPA concentration and given time to swell, the sample could be vitrified after rapidly adding a high concentration. The upshot was much less overall toxicity, Higgins said. Healthy cell survival following vitrification rose from about 10% with a conventional approach to greater than 80%.
“The biggest single problem and limiting factor in vitrification is CPA toxicity and the swelling method was quite useful for addressing that,” he said. “Our new paper extends this line of research by presenting a new model of mass transfer in tissue; a key feature is that it allows for the prediction of tissue size changes.”
Higgins notes that there have been observations of multiple types of tissues changing size after exposure to CPA solutions; among them are cartilage, ovarian tissue and groups of cell in the pancreas known as islets. More likely than not, those size changes are important considerations for the design of methods for tissue vitrification, he said.
“The conventional mass transfer modeling approach is known as Fick’s law and that assumes tissue size remains constant,” Higgins said. “Our new model, which we used for two very different types of tissues, articular cartilage and pancreatic islets, opens the door to extending our previous mathematical optimization approach to the design of better methods for the cryopreservation of various tissue types.”
So by the looks of it now, this team has "been" uncovering solutions and their old experiment was the one that must have raised the cell survival rate from ~10% to 80%+, but only for a single cell layer of cells, not a 3D organ. Their new model appears to top /that/ and do even better, but has not been tested yet. Well, that's even more exciting by the sounds of it. The fact that they have made a single layer of cells freeze much safer than the older method, is a huge success. And the fact that they have planned out a new model for better freezing is even more exciting. Will it work on 3D tissues and big ones? I don't know, but it looks like they have made a lot of success.
