. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Dec 11.

Published in final edited form as: Nat Biotechnol. 2017 Jun 7;35(6):530–542. doi: 10.1038/nbt.3889

Table 3.

Unmet needs for organ preservation

Area of biomedicine	Example of public health need
Organ transplantation	Almost 70% of US donor hearts go untransplanted, largely due to preservation limits on assessment and matching^{2,38,79,92,170}
Cancer treatment and fertility	Ovary banking can save fertility/hormone balance in 140,000 girls and young women diagnosed with cancer and potentially exposed to chemo- and radiotherapy in the United States each year¹¹⁷
Emergency preparedness	Banked bone marrow and cord blood could benefit >10,000 patients after a nuclear accident or attack^130,171 as well as 14,000 US patients each year suffering acute injury who would benefit from a transplant¹⁷²
Limb recovery and transplantation	30,000 traumatic amputations per year in the United States; two-thirds of victims are children and young adults¹³³
Basic medical research	Human tissue would be a superior model to the 100 million mice and rats used in research each year¹⁷³; tissue banking advances are critically needed to aid approaches seeking to treat malignancies¹⁷⁴, neurodegenerative diseases¹⁷⁵, and other disorders
Trauma care	30,000 patients admitted to specialized US burn units each year¹⁷⁶. After a nuclear accident/attack, and estimated ~3% of the skin grafts required would currently be available¹⁷⁷
Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine Drug discovery	Shelf life of regenerative medicine products, a sector with a predicted >$500-billion market by 2025¹⁷⁸ Banked human tissue would benefit pre-clinical drug testing and potentially improve low efficiency of drug development^179,180