Pressing pause on biological time for those who need it most
Pressing pause on biological time for those who need it most
We can reversibly cryopreserve living tissue. From this point, the advent of new technologies becomes not only attainable, but urgent — technologies to enable better neuroscience research, procure better-matched organs for transplant patients, and help patients pause their biological time until cures for fatal diseases become available.
When we started the company, we knew it was possible to cryopreserve human tissue (IVF) and later saw evidence for whole organs in rodents (Han et al., 2023). But we didn’t know whether neural tissue would survive and recover function from the same interventions.
As of February 2024, we’re excited to announce that we’ve recovered electrical activity in a cryopreserved and rewarmed slice of rodent neural tissue (see whitepaper).
Our February data is the first milestone in a research program to solve this problem at all medically relevant biological scales. You can read our problem statement and full roadmap here. We will develop technologies to reversibly cryopreserve whole human organs for clinical use, and human neural tissue for research use, de-risking key questions relevant to whole-body cryopreservation while building products that help patients and researchers today. In parallel, we will hit core milestones specific to whole-body reversible cryopreservation.
We will release data for each milestone should we achieve them. We next aim to show both long term potentiation preserved in a slice of neural tissue and long-range connectivity preservation in a whole rodent brain. For our organ preservation research program, our subsequent goal is to achieve a preclinical proof of concept with a successful organ preservation in a large animal model.
We're working on hard problems at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and physics. If this sounds exciting, check out our careers page or reach out at hi@cradle.xyz.