To celebrate the growth and development of the RSC Applied Polymers community and to highlight the remarkable authors who continue to contribute their high quality work to the journal we would like to share the opinions and insights of these authors through this introductory blog post. Once dubbed #RSCAppliedfirst50, our blog posts aim to give a voice to the authors behind the research and hope that their insights might shed light upon growing challenges and progress in polymer science and its applications.
In this edition, we hear from Professor Matthew Gibson and Dr Natalia Gonzalez-Martinez as they discuss their article, ‘Cryopreservation and post-thaw differentiation of monocytes enabled by macromolecular cryoprotectants which restrict intracellular ice formation‘.
An introduction to ‘Cryopreservation and post-thaw differentiation of monocytes enabled by macromolecular cryoprotectants which restrict intracellular ice formation’
In my team at Manchester, we have a major interest in what we term ‘Chemical Cryobiology’: using chemistry to probe, understand and hopefully improve cryopreservation and other low-temperature applications. One of our themes is to discover macromolecules which can address the mechanism of damage which cells suffer during freezing, which cannot be addressed using standard cryoprotectants, which are typically solvents such as DMSO.
In our recent paper in RSC Applied Polymers, we wanted to improve the cryopreservation of THP-1 cells: these are monocytes and widely used in basic research but are well-known to ‘not freeze well’. So, after you thaw them, you need to grow them up again rather than ‘just using them’. Considering this, we decided to deploy our poly(ampholyte)s which we have developed in our lab: poly(ampholyte)s are known to aid in cryopreservation and our material is very useful as it is synthetically scalable (cryopreservation using quite high concentrations) and very potent. In this work we show how we can really improve the THP-1 cells recovery. However, we also used Ramam cryomicroscopy to discover these polymers act to reduce ice formation inside cells which we think helps explain how they work. This understanding is helping us to develop next-generation cryoprotectants.
The next stages in this work are vast! There are many cells/tissues which do not freeze well, including organoids which are of large interest for their potential to replace animal testing. We also have interest in how to develop therapeutically (rather than biotechnologically) deployable materials. There are a lot of unanswered problems in cryobiology, which I feel we can address using chemistry (and especially polymeric!) tools.
Meet the authors
Matthew I. Gibson
Matthew Gibson holds a Chair in Sustainable Biomaterials at the University of Manchester, UK based in Chemistry and the Institute of Biotechnology since 2023. He completed his MChem and PhD (2007) at the University of Durham; Post-doc at EPFL (Switzerland). From 2009 Matt was at the University of Warwick (2009) as Assistant, Associate and Full Professor (2016), appointed between Chemistry and the Medical School. His multidisciplinary research group focusses on developing new materials to address challenges in Biotechnology and Healthcare with a particular focus on cryobiology. Matt was a Royal Society Industry Fellow with Cytiva (2019-2023), has held ERC Starter and Consolidator Grants and been involved in various aspects of technology transfer. Matt has been awarded several prizes including the Corday Morgan, McBain, Dextra and MacroGroup Young Researcher’s medals as well prizes from the American Chemical Society, and an RSC Horizon Prize for ‘Team Ice’.
Natalia Gonzalez-Martinez
Natalia Gonzalez-Martinez is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Nottingham, where she works on evaluating macrophage immune cell response to surfaces under the supervision of Prof. Amir Ghaemmaghami. Natalia recently completed her PhD at the University of Warwick, and served as a visiting student at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology under the supervision of Prof. Matthew Gibson. During her PhD, her research was focused on improving immune cell recovery and function after cryopreservation, using both biophysical and biochemical methods. Previously, she completed a BSc in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Kent, during which she undertook an Industrial Placement in Cell and Gene Therapy at GlaxoSmithKline.
Cryopreservation and post-thaw differentiation of monocytes enabled by macromolecular cryoprotectants which restrict intracellular ice formation
Natalia Gonzalez-Martinez, Ruben M. F. Tomás, Akalabya Bissoyi, Agnieszka Nagorska, Alexandru Ilie and Matthew I. Gibson
RSC Appl. Polym., 2025, 3, 990-1001. DOI: 10.1039/D5LP00131E
RSC Applied Polymers is a leading international journal for the application of polymers, including experimental and computational studies on both natural and synthetic systems. In this journal, you can discover cross-disciplinary scientific research that leverages polymeric materials in a range of applications. This includes high impact advances made possible with polymers across materials, biology, energy applications and beyond.