Disclosure
Until aims for reversible whole-body cryopreservation after mastering single organ transplants
“Our long-term goal is reversible whole body cryopreservation for, you know, medical sort of hibernation. But in the near term, what we work on is reversibly cryopreserving human, single human organs to help transplant patients get organs more efficiently.”
Opinion
Deming: Society's failure to recognize aging as a disease hinders research
“I think longevity and aging kind of occupy this weird realm where because they're not like explicitly diseases in a way that's fully socially recognized yet, they're not seen as valid to work on.”
Insight
Deming: Brain injury tolerance remains the bottleneck for whole-body cryopreservation
“The big unknown to get to whole body reversible is the brain. It's unclear, like the brain can withstand a lot of change and does withstand a lot of different types of damage or change with age, for example. But it's unclear whether, like, what kind of injury …”
Assertion Supported
Deming: Rewarmed cryopreserved kidneys successfully restore normal organ function in rats
“Greg Faheed has done excellent work sort of looking at reversible cryopreservation in kidneys, and showing, like, you can reversibly cryopreserve a kidney, rewarm it, put it into a rat that does not have another kidney, and that rat returns to normal function …”
Insight
Deming: Medical hibernation carries severe psychological costs of losing social context
“And that will put a limit on, like, how much people want to use this for, like, I think there's, like, a real cost that, that kind of you incur. And so it's, in my mind, it only makes sense for, like, really serious use cases initially where, like, you literal…”
Insight
Deming: Cryobiology uniquely allows swapping biological complexity for engineering difficulty
“Not specific or something, but it is actually one of the core reasons why I think the problem is interesting to work on, which is that, like, you can trade off, like, engineering difficulty and biological difficulty to a non-zero degree. Like, not, not a hundr…”
Assertion Supported
Deming: Immunotherapy raised metastatic melanoma ten-year survival to over 50 percent
“Like sort of in a single year, like metastatic melanoma went from being something that you had like a six to nine month prognosis, like less than a year of expected survival, to with like, you know, new combination immunotherapies, you might have a decade plus…”
Insight
Deming: Speeding through nucleation temperature ranges prevents tissue ice formation
“Ice sort of forms through a process of random nucleation and then extension. And this is cool because you can modulate the, like, sort of nucleation, the rate of nucleation and extension to then modulate the probability of ice formation. And because it's proba…”
Assertion Supported
Deming: Human embryos cryopreserved for over thirty years yield viable pregnancies
“There have been human embryos that were reversibly, that were, you know, cry preserved for the latest record was over 30 years, and then rewarmed and sort of viably used to create pregnancy, and then, you know, sort of like, there are kids who were literally c…”
Disclosure
Until simultaneously develops human organ cryopreservation and reversible whole-rat hibernation
“We work on the two in parallel. So we both work on scaling up preservation and rewarming technologies to kind of human organ scale. And also in parallel, we work on a sort of whole rat reversible hibernation and transitioning technologies over from sort of wha…”
Assertion Supported
Deming: Organ transplantation is severely bottlenecked by last-minute travel logistics
“Right now for matching, it's like everything's done at literally the last minute. It's like someone Dies and organ becomes available. And like, you're just kind of calling around trying to find, like, what patient is available to get this organ, and you don't …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Co-founder Hunter Davis re-derived statistical mechanics for Until's cryopreservation guide
“Hunter went back and like re-derived fundamental laws of stat and mech as part of like, this is what you should know in craft preservation doc.”
Laura Deming