Keep pulling the thread on Laura Deming.
The long-term goal of the company Until is to achieve reversible whole-body cryopreservation for medical hibernation, allowing patients with terminal illnesses to pause their biological time until a cure is developed.
In the near term, Until is focused on developing a product for reversibly cryopreserving single human organs to solve logistical problems in transplantation, where organs frequently expire due to timing issues.
Academic research, including work from John Bischof's group and Greg Fahy, has shown it is possible to cryopreserve a rat kidney, rewarm it, and transplant it into a rat where it regains normal function after about a month.
Laura Deming states that the biggest unknown in achieving whole-body reversible cryopreservation is the brain's ability to withstand the process and what level of functional fidelity can be preserved.
The prognosis for metastatic melanoma improved from a 6-to-9 month survival to over a decade of expected survival in a single year due to the introduction of new combination immunotherapies.
Until's research and development is progressing on two parallel tracks: scaling up cryopreservation and rewarming technologies for human-scale organs, and simultaneously working on whole-body reversible hibernation in a rat model.
Human embryos have been successfully cryopreserved for over 30 years before being rewarmed and used to create a viable pregnancy.
The primary technical challenge in cryopreservation is to cool tissue below -130°C, the temperature at which ice formation stops, without ice crystals forming and causing cellular damage.
Currently, organ transplant patients must remain within a two-hour radius of their transplant center at all times, carrying a notification device, in case an organ becomes available.
Laura Deming asserts that successfully cryopreserving organs would fundamentally change the paradigm of transplantation by making time a non-variable, allowing for scheduled surgeries and optimal patient-organ matching.
In cryopreservation, engineering improvements that increase cooling and rewarming rates can reduce the required concentration of toxic cryoprotective agents, making the biological challenge easier.