Laura Deming, CEO of Until and founder of the Longevity Fund, explains why aging science suffers from a social blind spot.
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.”
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…”