Laura Deming, CEO of Until, discusses the major scientific hurdles facing whole-body reversible cryopreservation.
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.”
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…”