Iranian primary school classmates, who were serendipitously reunited in a Queensland university lab, have developed a device that may revolutionise tissue transplants.

PhD students Ashkan Heidarkhan Tehrani and Pooya Davari, both from Tehran, were sitting side-by-side in a lab at the Queensland University of Technology when they began talking about home.

Tissue samples used by PhD students Ashkan Heidarkhan Tehrani and Pooya Davari who developed a device to sterilise tissue for transplants.

"We said, 'Where was your primary school? Oh, I was going to that primary school. Which year?' And then we figured out that we were actually classmates in primary school," Mr Tehrani said.

"We came to Australia - a different continent - after 25 years of being classmates in elementary school and were again sitting next to each other."