Can medicine ever hit the pause button?

A new article by Longevity.Technology covers a cryopreservation startup that has just secured $58 million to explore a technology both profoundly practical and extravagantly ambitious – keeping organs viable for longer, and ultimately, perhaps, keeping us viable for longer too.

The immediate target is organ transplantation. Hearts expire in hours, kidneys in a day or so – clocks that tick too quickly for patients, surgeons and air traffic controllers alike. If we could extend that window to days, weeks or even indefinitely, logistics would ease, matching would improve, and thousands more lives could be saved. This is not science fiction; it is a hard problem of perfusion fluids, cryoprotective molecules and controlled rewarming, and Until Labs is trying to solve it.

The long-term vision, however, is far less modest. If you can preserve a heart, why not a body? If you can restart cellular processes after hours on ice, why not after months? There is a whiff of the speculative here, and perhaps more than a whiff of science fiction, yet the very act of pouring capital into the project means some investors believe the frozen frontier deserves a second look.

For longevity, the implications are twofold. First, technology that keeps donor organs viable could transform a corner of medicine that is currently wasteful and heartbreaking in equal measure. Second, the pursuit of whole-body reversible cryopreservation challenges our comfortable assumptions about the irreversibility of time. It may never succeed – biology is stubborn, ice is sharp – but the intellectual audacity is itself instructive. After all, geroscience is about testing the limits of what can be delayed, prevented, slowed or perhaps suspended altogether.

Cryonics has long been the butt of cultural jokes, all stainless steel tubes and science fiction tropes. But when serious teams with serious backers start to build the infrastructure – high-voltage rewarming coils, discovery platforms for cryoprotectants, scalable protocols – then it becomes harder to dismiss the field as fanciful. Whether the aim is more predictable organ transplants or speculative hibernation, the work forces us to ask a deeper question: if time is a biological process, not a metaphysical one, might it one day be paused?

🔗 Read Cryopreservation startup lands $58m to ‘pause biological time’ HERE. Plus discover Yale University ’s latest findings on how our organs age at different speeds – and what it could mean for extending healthy years.

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