Laura Deming announces $58M raise for cryopreservation startup Intel Labs, targeting organ transplants first

[Music] And we're breaking some news today. Yes, we're some news. I'm very excited. Get that get that gong ready. Phone. Get the microphone as close as you can and uh, introduce yourself for those who might not know. Hi. Uh, I'm Laura. I run Until Labs.

So, we are trying to make the hibernation pods that you've seen in Interstellar reality. But to get there, um, we want to help transplant patients get the organs that they need by reversally cry preserving organs. Wow. Uh, yeah. Start with something easy. Yeah.

Give us a little backtory like what what actually set you up to be in a position to start this type of company. It seems incredibly difficult from a scientific perspective. Yeah. So, my backstory is like I spent a decade working in longevity.

um a long time adventure and I think it's just really frustrating to think spend that much time trying to solve a problem and you really want to find like one critical lynch point like one thing where you can solve it and then it helps everything else and so to me it's like wow it would be so cool to make a hydration plot where you like if you had a terminal illness and you needed a critical cure like you could sort of wait let's say one to two years to make it to the point where a therapy for your disease comes out um and of course the key step to get there is showing that this sci-fi technology which works for millions of IVF you know embryos there's people walking around today who are crops Three plus years as embryos.

That's crazy. Really crazy. Three. Uh 30 plus years. 30 plus years. Three. Three. Wait. 30. 30. 30. Yes. Yeah. Actually, the the record for the longest prior preserved team embryo just came out. No way. And it was 30 years. So this person's born and they're kind of 30 on day one. Yeah. Some ways.

They're twins that were preserved at the same time and then they're rewormed at different times. So it's really interesting. We have the tech. That's crazy. But just scaling that up to human organs and showing like in the clinic for transplant patients that we can actually actually help.

Wait, so I mean I imagine you don't go straight from embryo to human. Is there an animal step in the mid in like Laura is saying the the midstep is you you you take like I don't know a lung or a kidney or something like that that that is but why not why not mouse? Why not mouse?

So actually the really cool thing is the field of crybology has been around for decades and uh you know there's been incredible scientists um shout out to University of Minnesota who already published showing that for example can reversely cry preserve mouse kidneys.

So you know the field of crybology has already done incredible incredible work and we're just working to scale that up to a human organ scale.

Um but but the mouse PC has done like you can take a mouse kidney totally cry preserve it rewarm it put it back in a mouse that does not have another kidney and that mouse will be you know good to go. Yeah. What what's the state-of-the-art in just freeze the full mouse? Are are we are we making any progress there?

Somebody must have tried it by now. We we have this funny uh interaction with uh Zach Weinberg. He came on the show and was like, "Whenever you're testing a drug, you do all this research in in the lab and then uh it's uh time to make a decision. Uh what was it? Uh rat or monkey?

Like you're going to do a test in one of them and then you'll get to human trials. " And it feels like that's a natural progression. Is that not the natural progression here? Um so people have been trying to cry preserve whole organisms for a long time.

There's some pretty crazy studies that came out in the 50s that that worked on this.

Um, but I think like basically it's just it's like if we can't reversibly cryopreserve like we we just got the kind of studies that did the reprodution organs really well like to the point where you could bring them back and show that they were fully functioning um you know like in the past couple years.

Uh there have been some published in the past decade but kind of I think that like really kind of nailing like um the uh the protocols is is pretty recent. Um, and so and I think you want to get that right before you try going after you know a whole organism. Sure.

What are the what are the levers that you pull in cryopreservation that aren't just temperature like I imagine we've tried just make it really really cold. Yeah. Yeah.

So actually also one cool fact I don't you know once you get down below -30°C you can keep like an animal there indefinitely basically time basically stops kind of in that temperature range. Wait how how cold again? Belowus 130 degrees. 130 Celsius. Okay. It's pretty cold.

Um but yeah the molecules basically aren't moving. So like like I mentioned you like 30 plus years for human embryos. Um Sure. Yeah. But uh but are there other are there other uh decisions and tradeoffs to make besides temperature? Um yeah.

So it's really so one of the things I love the most about this I know I worked in deep tech for a long time. One of the cool things about this problem is a trade-off between biology and engineering. So you have this danger zone and basically the thing you want basically the thing like our enemy in cryp is ice.

Like you think that we love ice but we actually hate ice. Like cold but you don't like ice. We love cold but we don't like ice. Um because when ice forms it expands and it breaks the tissue around it. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So what we want to do is we want to make glass. Glass. Wait.

So yeah, I mean if I have blood in my organ and that expands, that's bad. It's breaking the tissue. How do you freeze something without creating ice out of the blood? Well, if you're if you're doing an individual organ, I'm assuming you take drain everything out. Is that right? No.

There's two different things you can do. It's very close. So one is you can replace the chemicals in the organs. So you can replace a lot of the blood with a chemical that prevents ice formation. Okay.

Um, and is that just something that freezes below 130, so it's not freezing and it stays a liquid, or is that just It's a couple things. So, it it'll turn into a basically if you if you uh cool fast enough, it'll turn into a glass.

Um, and it does this through kind of um decreasing the number of water molecules and also kind of like um there's a couple other mechanics that might be involved. Okay. So, you don't just have to get cold, you have to get cold fast. That's part of the goal. Yeah.

So, it's like it's like can you make a chemicals that do that and can you get cold fast? And basically like can you traverse this danger zone at ice formation down to like once you get to 130 you're good like below that you're totally fine but going through there as fast as possible. How fast is fast?

Are we talking like minutes? Seconds go seconds. Yeah. Current protocols work on the order of um you know maybe hours. Ideally want less than that.

Yeah I imagine if I put water in the fridge or in the freezer it's pretty cold like it still takes a couple hours but I imagine if it's negative 130 it probably turns into ice a little bit faster. Obviously, if it's a smaller amount of liquid, it's going to freeze faster.

There's a whole bunch of different trade-offs there. Um, what's it like uh fundraising for a business like this? Because I imagine some of the backers are kind of thinking like, I want this for myself. You know, I've always I've always wanted to go in the cryogenic chamber and be able to tell.

Do you remember that famous Sam Alman interview where there was a YC company that was doing some something along cryopreservation and as part of his he was running YC at the time and he said like, "I'm on board. I will sign that that you can freeze me after I die.

But part of theirs was that they I think they technically had to kill you. And so the headline that was like the twisted version of what he said was like Sam Alman agrees agrees to be killed by this portfolio company. I mean that's value ad. It's value ad. What other VC is willing to die for your company?

Um but but yeah, what's it been like fundraising? Yeah, it's an interesting difference between like there there's companies where they're kind of like we'll carve you and we're not sure whether we can bring you back. And I think what was really compliant to us is like let's make this like a real defect company.

Like let's let's go and like our bar is reversible cry preservation. Like when we take an organ, we have to show that the whole or you know it's like you wouldn't buy an IVF product where it's like oh we'll cry preserve it and we're not sure you can bring your MV back. We want to show the whole thing works.

And that's a bar where it's like okay if we're raising from deep tech firms, right? Like they're going to want to talk about like what's the business that gets you there.

You know like if you can cry preserve an organ reversibly and help you know like thousands of transplant patients, you know, who are otherwise losing organs, you know, hundreds of thousands who are on the waiting list and like millions who might use an organ but just don't have access to them.

like you know that that that kind of forces you I think to hit this bar of you know showing you can rewarm them with function. Walk me through the current state of organ transplantation.

I mean I feel like most people probably know that they have a you know a little thing that they can check on their ID if they're unfortunately you know killed they they their organ might be transplanted might be frozen for a little bit but we they can pass away too. They don't have to be killed murderous podcaster.

But uh but but but I I feel like we've heard this story of like the the organ was put in a helicopter and and traveled and it it was moved from one body to another very very quickly. Yeah. What's the current like like shelf life of organs?

It sounds like that's the most low hanging fruit is just extend that even if you just double it that's going to be really really positive for the organ transplant market. It's it's the craziest logistical process I've ever heard of. Explain it to me. So like you know some organs have a 4 to 12 hour you know shelf life.

others might have in 2436, but you know, it's like it's it's a very short time period and you have no idea when the donor is going to pass.

And so basically like a medical surgeon gets a call maybe in the middle of the night, go charter like at the last minute, a private plane to fly to like the place where the person has just um donated the organ, pick it up, bring it back.

You know, transplant patients wait within you two hour radius and then go back to the the patient that's getting the transplant. Yeah.

And if you're transplant patient like you have to wait like right next to the you know hospital where you might get the surgery for months, you know, in some cases a lot longer than that. Yeah. you know, just waiting to get the call in the middle of the night. You have to have a patron on you at all times.

It's just like this crazy logistical process. Um like like your organ, if you need this particular organ, you're going to get a call and you need to go to the hospital because it's coming on a private jet that day. Exactly. Yeah.

And like I don't know if you know that the company Blade um it's like I think they did like a couple hundred million medical they did they did they split the business. Yeah. They actually developed a business.

So, so your initial product is like focused on solving that like like you don't even need to be able to freeze an organ and bring it back over over a decade. It's more it's more like just solving this logistical nightmare. Is that kind of the idea?

Well, cool thing is once you're in the temperature range, you could preserve the organ for as long as possible, but yeah, in the near term it's like let's get that organ to the patient as soon as possible, but like let's not have to have a surgeon get on a private plane, you know, like like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And so do you I mean we we we track artificial intelligence progress a lot on this show. Uh all the AI labs are trying to just see exponential growth in the amount of time that AI can think. We went from one minute to deep research can do 20 minutes. GPT5 is doing more.

Do do you think that the progress of your business will track sort of a smooth exponential where we'll go from 4 to 12 hours to one day to two days to four days to eight days 16 and just kind of expand from there? or do you think there'll be some sort of like binary unlock?

There's a new technology and now it's five years. Well, to me to me the it sounds like the bigger jump is like like you said once you get the temperature down you can go basically forever.

The bigger jump is like how do you go from a single organ that you can you can swap it sounds like swap out the blood for another chemical that allows it to to stay really cold without having the ice expansion. But it's like how do you go from an organ to a system, right?

And how do you go from a system to a a whole body, right? Because if you replaced all the blood in yourself with some chemical like is your brain going to function the same way when you take, you know, like there's a lot of unknowns, right? Yeah. So the thing we track is scaling size like that.

That's the big thing, right? So we know we can reverse carbon embryos, you know, a couple hundred cells. We know carb observe like, you know, worms, that's a thousand cells. You know, now rating that massively scales up like number of cells.

But just yeah, it's basically scaling size because, you know, as you get larger, it's way harder to cool something quickly. You like imagine you put a snowflake on your hand, it'll like be warm very quickly, but a large turkey for Thanksgiving takes, you know, maybe a day or more to defrost.

So, you're what what what is uh one I I I kind of want to get a sense of uh like timelines for the company specifically raised $58 million.

like you want to deploy that effectively but quickly to show progress, but like what kind of milestones are you looking at and what is the actual I'm assuming the hardware that you're developing is like focusing on cooling cooling things quickly uh consistently uh and then is it a machine that you're trying to scale up over time or what is what does the actual hardware look like and then what are the kind of milestones that you're trying to achieve?

Yeah. So, um, you know, the cool thing with this with this new round that we just, uh, are announcing today with Founders Fund, you know, really excited to have them on board. Also, Lux is joining in Field Ventures. Um, just shout out to like all of our investors who've been awesome.

Um, basically like the goal is to get an organ product, you know, like into the clinic. So, like right now we're working on developing a lot of the protocols. Um, you know, we build uh new chemical formulations, we build cooling systems, we build new warming systems.

So, basically just like iterating, you know, as quickly as possible. One of the things I love about this problem is the speed of iteration preclinally. It's sort of like very unlike a lot of biology where you can just, you know, um sort of test uh in like whole human sized organs a lot of your protocols weekly.

Um yeah, we're just working on getting that product to the point we can bring it to patients. Uh take me into sci-fi world. Uh sleep pods for space travel. What are the implications? What are the trade-offs of of that? Uh is it just like I go to sleep, I wake up on Mars? Are we gonna be going to Alpha Centauri?

like when you really really play out the future, like I've always I've always had the the mind that uh if we're going to places that are light years away, the speed of light holds, the the laws of physics hold, and so you're you're embarking on, you know, thousands of years journey.

You're going to have these colony ships where the people that arrive are completely different than the people that leave. But it sounds like there might be an alternative path. Yeah. Even even here on Earth, the the scenario we were talking about uh offline Oh, yeah.

was this sense of let's say you're a 80-year-old billionaire. You've experienced everything there is to experience in life in the current era and you your technology exists.

And I and I go, I want to just be, you know, put to I want to hibernate for the next 50 years and I'm going to just be placed on my little uh doomsday ranch in New Zealand and I'm going to have a staff whose job is to just protect me effectively, hang out and make sure nobody messes with me while I'm asleep and in 50 years I want to wake up.

And so this 80-year-old can go from being 80 Yeah. they can just effectively like go to sleep for 50 years and wake up and suddenly they get to experience something completely novel and even though they're 80 years old, they get this experience of being in an entirely different era of human history.

And I think a lot of people would get all the Avatar sequels, they don't need to wait. Yeah. No, a lot of a lot of people would get to the point in their life where they're like, "Okay, I've seen enough. I've done enough. " Sure.

Uh I I while I still have life in me, I want to be able to see something, you know, completely new. And there's a risk that the, you know, global collapse happens. My my doomsday ranch gets raided and everything gets but but like there's the multilanetary future and possibility, but there's also just life here on Earth.

If life here on Earth is going to look wild and different if you're obsessed with the future today and you're impatient and you're not you're not necessarily believe that you're going to live another 50 years, you could teleport effectively. Yeah.

So I mean like one thing to your point is like if you want humans in space like you I I think someone said to me like if you if you want human space you need like AI plausibly you need like definitely you know spaceships but you also need cryo like you know it's it's the best way to allow for like long-term um transportation but even in the near term one thing that we really care about just like helping people who would otherwise not get therapies kind of like make it to the critical point.

So my co-founder Hunter, his father-in-law um was diagnosed with like metastatic methyloma. He missed a critical clinical trial by like a couple months, you know, wasn't eligible because of the the severity of his disease that could have given him, you know, extra time with his family.

Um might have given a shot of remission. Um and I think it's just like really or I don't know for me it's like much more nearly like let's just like help people who are like literally not and like I knew somebody who got meticuloma and like because he got it the year that he got it got like 10 plus years of prognosis.

The year before would have been 6 to9 months. Wow. Right. Like that 2014 to 2015 was like a really really crazy time to be in that like to be a patient for Yeah. Uh what what about the the pure sci-fi thought experiment of like cryo as a time machine that jumps you forward.

If if if a device existed right over there, you walk through that door and when you walk out in a blink of an eye, it's 30 years later. Yeah. Would you do it, Jordy? Would you do that? It's such an interesting thought experiment because there's all these like risks.

Bad things could happen, but great things could happen. It's kind of a proxy on like your overall view on optimism over over some period of time. Yeah. I mean, I would want to take my family and stuff. I don't know.

I can I can easily envision the the scenario of of like being being towards the end of your life and just being like one more year of being in this retirement home. But what if you're young? What if you're 20 and you're just young? I'm not doing it. I love the present.

I want I I want to see I'm I'm impatient for my flying car. I'm just going to jump forward to 2050 and just be the most out of the loop person in the world. Yeah, I think I think the question comes down to like how resource is it resource intensive, right? Assume it's free for this thought experiment.

Okay, assume it's free. I'm not doing it. I I like surfing the present. I don't need to I don't need to teleport, but I can easily imagine people certainly in the medical case like it makes tons of sense.

If you're like incredibly AGI build and you believe that like uh you know abundance is around the corner, would you would you freeze yourself in if if the alternative was working at McDonald's? There's no risk. Yeah.

I mean like even even in the medical scenario like there's no risk that you just get hit by a bus or less in this thought experiment. So you get to jump forward to the post scarcity AGI future. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. Some people might just some people might take it.

I wonder what I wonder what Yeah, I'll see you on the other side. Be fascinating. Have you seen passengers? Passengers. No, I need to. No one's seen this. Yeah, you're familiar. It's a It's a good movie about this exact about this exact topic.

Uh well, you you said you're building this company as a hard tech, deep tech company. Uh what does that actually look like of like crazy sci-fi extremely pragmatic? Here's a problem that is solvable. We know we can do it already. We need to apply it to a new domain like kidneys or like these other organs. Exactly.

And that and that's helpful with like recruiting because it's like hey we like somebody that is le more riskaverse could be like I'm working at a medical device startup and someone else can be like I'm working on cryotherapy that's interesting and you're both working on the same technology. Yeah. Yeah. No exactly.

I think that that that's one cool thing about it. I think also for us deep tech means like we do almost everything we can in house. So like we like build every part of the system that we can in house. Like we have a team of like amazing engineers, neuroscientists, monkey biologists, you know, chemists.

It's like we try to like it's like um just like move full stack in house. I think that if you run a deep company just like your iteration cycle is the main limiter on your progress. So the more that you can like do in houses um and it's good that you talk fast because you talk like twice as fast as us. No, it's good.

It's good. You can just you're you're you know one minute for you is like two minutes for us. Yeah. What what are some crazy have any other countries done anything? Do you believe like Russia or China? How many humans do you think are frozen right now? Um, it us humans anywhere in the world or or interstellar.

She sends send sent the Slack message off. How many how many we got? How many we got? No.

I mean I mean like for Conics it's like I think that there are these products where it's like you cry preserve someone but like you're just really not sure if the procedure you use to cry preserve them is going to bring them it's possible to bring them back.

And I think we don't like we just don't really know like how to think about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but but it but is it like a hundred because we've heard lore about like, oh, this person had their head frozen, this person had their body. I would say a lot of those stories are not true. They're just not true. Yeah.

Like a lot of the really popular ones I think are are incorrect. Yeah, that makes sense. What about what what if what if uh what what countries uh are are investing outside of the US or kind of care about this problem area or opportunity?

I I think China might be um like I'm not on the ground there at all like not to know but that's that's something that yeah I've heard a little bit about. Yeah. Do the printers work in your office? Why do you ask?

Uh there's this there's this funny interaction uh where uh in the in the early 2000s Peter Teal went to tour a uh a freeze your body type of startup. And the contract that he had to sign he was like he was like I'm all in on this technology. print up the contract, all sign it.

I think he was there with Luke Nosk and uh the printer wasn't working.

And he was like, "That wasn't very didn't instill a lot of confidence that like if they couldn't get their printer working, they like I wasn't he was like I wasn't uh I wasn't ready to, you know, trust them with freezing my entire body if their printer doesn't work.

" So, you know, it's like how you do anything is how you do everything. Yeah. I think that's where like organs are a good bar. Let's just like help some transplant patients, you know, like Yeah. Exactly. Uh what Yeah, it's interesting.

There there's it feels like uh what what you're doing is would be very disruptive to the traditional organ transplant business. That is would it be or would it is it very like synergistic actually?

I think for companies like Blade where it's like they're getting 100 mill a couple hundred million revenue off of like literally just helicopters transporting organs. Like I think that's the part that we want to take off. Yeah. Super time sensitive, right? Be much cheaper to just put it on like a FedEx truck. Yeah.

or or or just Yeah, just some type of like falling down the stairs. Yeah, but she's going to make uh Have you ever had anything delivered by I mean, the system's going to be indestructible, right? You're going to be able to throw it off the building, right? Does she say that? Did she promise an indestructible device?

I I I believe I believe add it to the add it to the to-do list. Make product indestructible. Well, yeah, we'll get right on that.

But yeah, I mean I think like most people in transplant like you know the patient way better for patients you know they don't have to get a last minute call like for surgeons they don't have to do like an overnight where they're like doing you know like literally like an all nighter to do a surgery like that's yeah and that probably uh makes it harder to actually be alert like there's a ton of examples of like the night shift just quality and even in manufacturing the night shift often performs slightly worse and you can tell in quality assurance just for making widgets because people are tired and it's harder to get the best people to show up in the middle of the night and so you could imagine uh just just unlocking the ability for surgeons to be well rested is probably another value ad.

We would all love for surgeons to be well rested. Of course. Of course. Uh well, what's the interaction with the FDA like? What's the process like? I was talking to the Neurolink team about that.

And the FDA feels extremely difficult to deal with, like very slow, but then they've figured out how to move very quickly and have a great relationship. So, how are you thinking about the FDA relationship?

I mean I think one thing the FDA I mean I can't speak on their behalf obviously but just like take them seriously as partners like okay like you know when we kind of are going to engage with them like we want to bring them all the data that like we would want to see you know for I think a lot of the reason that the FDA is often portrayed as you know bad is that like there's not a lot of drugs that actually work and so like they're you know like looking at very difficult evidence to analyze it's like we just want to bring them evidence that the technology works and like have them give us feedback like that's yeah do they would they view this as like a medical device and take you through like the medical device approval process um That's that's like the default designation likely, but you know, like Yeah, up to them.

Cool. They could create a cool sci-fi path, too. They should. Anything's possible today. Possible. Yeah. Yeah. One executive order and there's now the FDA is like, "We got a cool sci-fi. Do some cool stuff. You got Space Force. We're going to If you've been in a blockbuster sci-fi film, just come over here.

" Yeah, that's great. Um, where else where else are you most excited uh in in longevity broadly? uh you've invested in a bunch of companies. Yeah. So I'm sure you can a good opportunity to to uh pump your bags and talk about uh sectors broadly.

I mean um speaking of the FDA, one uh really one thing I'm just really excited about is that like the FDA gave a like acceptance of efficacy data for life extension like for the first time in past years. Like shout out to Loyal. Yeah. I mean like that I think people outside don't get like that was a huge deal.

like the FDA has never, you know, like sort of thought about lifespan extension, the possibility of that on the label for a drug for dogs to start, you know, but like that that's just Yeah, it's it's really exciting. So like they that them kind of accepting that concept is a really big deal.

So you know, shout out to Selen and you know, Loyal for kind of making that getting that through. I think that's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting that like a precursor to getting a drug approved is a problem that they've defined. And how do you define that? Yeah, that's that's very good.

uh what what do you make of uh declining life expectancy in the US? Do you have a thesis on it or do you think it's going to turn around? Any predictions? Um that that's a good question.

I mean I I think like for context my field of expertise is like can we make small molecule or like sort of um I guess larger drugs that like predictively extend human lifespan by like some amount in a clinical trial. And like I I think that it's hard like I I'm I'm not an expert in things that are not that.

Well, not being an expert on something has never stopped anyone from a podcast. Uh, so so yeah. So, so what's next? Uh, what what was the total race? 50 something. Uh, so 58 million. 58 million. Yeah, it was uh Yeah. Well, 52 technically in the current round, including about 6.

What's on the what's on the to-do list over the next couple months? Is it all hiring? Do you need to find a facility, build out a facility, buy equipment? I mean, we just moved into a huge lab. Um we're hiring um you know looking for great neuroscientists, engineers.

Um that that's kind of the uh uh sort of um the main the main focus right now. Biologists as well. Yeah. You said neuroscientists um for for one part of the company. Yes. Okay. Can you talk more about that? Maybe in the next time that Okay. Next time.

There's always leaks in the not not on the PR release, but you dig into who they're hiring. Yeah. The career page really tells you a lot. Yeah. career page always tells you more about what's the priorities of the company. No, it really does because if a company is is worth a lot of money and they're not hiring at all.

Yeah, it's a question. It's a good question. But my team said that we definitely had to give you guys organ plushies. So, I want to give you fun. A little kidney. Thank you. Look at this. Very cute. Very cute. Just to Yeah. I almost had to get a kidney transplant when I was uh Oh my god, I'm so sorry. Five years old.

I had uh I I got an insane uh E. coli and so uh I was on like full dialysis for a long time and I was looking really bad. My mom was ready. And you're still going ahead with the calf implants, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those will be frozen. Those are Yeah. Not not even just implants transplants. Calf transplants.

It's the new level from the biggest the biggest mass mass possible. I want Ronnie Coleman's calves on my Yeah, that that could be a good way to test, you know, like people there's a lot of people that would like pay to get bicep transplant. It's lower stakes than like a organ that needs to really function.

Just throw I've been trying to gain 20 pounds of lean mass. It sounds like I could just get that transferred in in a weekend. These are these are great. You got to do it for the whole for the whole body, too. You got to throw your logo on here or something. Yeah, we need next time. Next time.

Well, thank you so much for being on the show for you. Do we have Do we have a guest? Bring the gun. Let Laura hit it. Let Laura hit it. Give it the hardest back. Thank you so much for coming on the