by Dr. Ken Kasza et al.

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Current Research on Medical Slurry Cooling

Argonne engineers/scientists and UC medical doctors are continuing research on ice-slurry protective cooling. One of the near-term goals is to obtain Federal Drug Administration approval of the ice slurry production and delivery equipment so it can be used to conduct clinical trials. Current research includes the following tasks:

• Continue to refine controls for delivery of the ice slurry and to establish its medical efficacy for laparoscopic kidney manipulations. This study will support the near-term start of human clinical trials.
•  Demonstrate the use of targeted ice slurry cooling during various cardiac/cardiovascular procedures for primary target cooling, as well as for protective cooling of secondary organs such as the kidney, brain, and intestinal tract. The proposed research will build upon Argonne’s recently demonstrated ability to make ice slurry from a blood substitute.
• Determine whether a subset of heart care procedures can be performed off-bypass and with cooling protection furnished only by targeted slurry cooling.
• Determine the efficacy of using slurry cooling to prevent reperfusion damage during arterial dilatation to open a blocked blood vessel via a catheter prior to insertion of a stent. Argonne has recently demonstrated the ability to deliver highly loaded ice slurry through small-diameter catheters longer than 1 meter, as illustrated in Figure 5.

The preceding research involves making further improvements in the slurries and the production/delivery equipment. We are also working on developing:

• methods for intentionally adding micro-bubbles of therapeutic gases,
• slurry equipment upgrades for real-time monitoring/display of percent ice loading/inventory and feedback control safety features regarding avoiding slurry delivery over pressurization and maintaining required protective temperature,
• capability for multiple routes/streams for slurry delivery, and
• slurries that have different carrier liquids such as blood substitutes.

Medical Ice Slurry Coolants for Inducing Targeted-Organ/Tissue Protective Cooling
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