Cryonics is important. Low-temperature storage of the brain is presently the only near-term approach that can provide those who die from old age with some greater than zero chance at a renewed life in the future. The cryonics industry has remained small since its inception decades ago, and only a few hundred people have been cryopreserved. The best way to expand and advance the small cryonics industry is to develop reversible vitrification of organs, a capability that has been demonstrated at the small scale in laboratories, and which has tremendous value to the organ transplant industry if made reliable. The ability to store a donated organ indefinitely would change all of the presently challenging economics of transplantation, and bring significant new funding into efforts to make cryopreservation that much more robust. Further, acceptance of the ability to vitrify and thaw organs would make acceptance of cryopreservation as a life-saving medical intervention of last resort that much easier.
Cryonics startup Until Labs has closed a $58 million Series A financing round, bringing its total raised to over $100 million as it works to build technology for reversible cryopreservation. The new funding round will enable Until to expand its team and infrastructure while advancing its first medical product: organ cryopreservation for transplant patients and surgeons.
The company's immediate focus is on overcoming one of transplant medicine's most rigid bottlenecks: the narrow window of organ viability. Hearts, lungs and livers must reach recipients within 4 to 12 hours of procurement, while kidneys last no longer than 24 to 36. These limits dictate the logistics of transplantation, confining patients to hospitals, requiring surgeons to charter planes to retrieve organs, and resulting in thousands of donations being discarded each year due to timing mismatches.
To address these challenges, Until is developing perfusion hardware, cryoprotective agents, and rapid rewarming infrastructure designed to preserve organs indefinitely without damaging their structure or function, then safely restore them for transplantation. The company says it has already built a discovery engine for new cryoprotective molecules, created a custom electromagnet for rewarming, and scaled its work from neural tissue slices to large-animal organs. It is now focused on refining protocols that preserve post-thaw organ quality.
The company's longer-term vision, however, extends far beyond transplant logistics, ultimately aiming for the holy grail of whole-body reversible cryopreservation. Its early work demonstrated recovery of electrical activity in rewarmed slices of rodent neural tissue. The company's previously stated roadmap includes showing preserved synaptic function in neural samples, successful cryopreservation of large-animal organs, human organ preservation clinical trials, and eventually reversible whole-body cryopreservation in animal models.
Link: https://longevity.technology/news/cryopreservation-startup-lands-58m-to-pause-biological-time/
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