Why Cryopreservation is No Longer Science Fiction with Until Co-founder and CEO Laura Deming

What It Covers

Laura Deming, founder of Until, explains how reversible cryopreservation technology works to pause biological time for organs and potentially whole bodies. The company targets organ transplant logistics first, then aims for medical hibernation to bridge patients to future cures, addressing scientific challenges around ice formation and tissue preservation.

Key Questions Answered

• •Ice Formation Physics: Cryopreservation success depends on traversing the danger zone between zero and minus 130 degrees Celsius without ice nucleation. Ice formation is stochastic, not deterministic, allowing probabilistic control through cooling rates and cryoprotective agents. Faster cooling and rewarming reduces required chemical concentrations, trading engineering solutions for biological toxicity problems in tissue preservation.
• •Proven Scalability Foundation: Human embryos have been successfully cryopreserved for over 30 years and revived to create viable pregnancies. Academic research demonstrates reversible kidney cryopreservation in rats, where animals with single preserved kidneys return to normal function after one month. The core scientific question is not whether preservation works, but how to scale from hundreds of cells to complex organs and whole bodies.
• •Organ Transplant Transformation: Current transplant patients must remain within two-hour radius of surgery centers, unable to travel or plan their lives while waiting. Organs expire rapidly, forcing last-minute matching decisions and surgeons to operate immediately after overnight flights. Removing time constraints allows optimal patient-organ matching, scheduled surgeries, and eliminates the frequent problem of patients missing available organs due to logistics.
• •Engineering-Biology Tradeoff: Temperature provides a unique conceptual lever in biology where physics equations actually apply to model molecular behavior. Teams can reduce biological challenges like cryoprotective agent toxicity by improving engineering solutions for faster, more uniform cooling and rewarming. This engineering-biology substitutability distinguishes cryopreservation from most biological problems where only therapeutic approaches work.
• •Medical Hibernation Timeline: Until targets near-term organ preservation for transplants as proof of concept before whole-body applications. The technology addresses cases where patients miss life-saving treatments by months, like metastatic melanoma therapies that shifted survival from six months to over a decade. Brain preservation remains the largest unknown for whole-body protocols, requiring research into acceptable neural tissue injury levels.