While science fiction fans associate cryogenics with Han Solo being iced and stories such as Robert Heinlein’s? Door Into Summer, the technology has been saving lives in Canberra for decades.

Canberra Hospital now has a new $1.1 million cryogenic store that almost quadruples the capacity of the old facility, sections of which dated to the early 1990s.

Use of the new facility, which was completed in February and is now fully online, is shared between ACT Pathology and the ACT Health Research Office.

It has six storage tanks and when a fourth 20K cryotank? comes online later this year, the cryostore? will be able to preserve almost 80,000 research samples and 4000 stem cell samples at a super-cool -196 degrees centigrade using liquid nitrogen.

ACT Pathology uses three of the larger tanks to store stem cells for the treatment, and hopefully, eradication of mainly blood cancers in patients from throughout the ACT and southern NSW.

While it is never possible to claim an absolute cure, the therapy has extended the lives of hundreds of patients over the past two decades, senior bone marrow scientist with ACT Pathology Jennifer Stapleton said.

In many cases, the results would have been considered miraculous by the standards of the 1960s and ’70s.

“We have done between 1200 and 1300 harvests since the [early] 1990s,” she said.

Ms Stapleton said while the treatments were intensive, quite costly and needed hospital stays of up to two or three weeks, a good result made it all worthwhile.

“Once we have harvested sufficient stem cells for reinfusion? and stored them in the cryotank? the patient is given a very high dose of chemotherapy to get rid of any remaining cancer.

“The stem cells are returned to the body via the bloodstream. What always stuns me is that the stem cells go home [to the bone marrow]. They know exactly where to go in the body.”

The other tanks are used by ACT Research to house a priceless tissue bank of medical research samples, some of which date back to the early 1990s.

While the stem cell tanks give medical staff the tools to change the lives of individual cancer patients, the research samples could potentially save many lives in the future.

“We have [many] different types of samples in storage,” ACT Research’s director of research operations Dr Hannah Clarke said. “They include cancerous tissues, samples from haematological? diseases and material from immunological deficiency studies.

“As new techniques are developed in research, we can use these tissues to re-evaluate something that may have been beyond the reach of medical science when it was first encountered.”

The potential exists for tissue samples stored at the Canberra Hospital to be shared with research institutions around the world.

Because the tissues have been preserved cryogenically?, they are in excellent condition.