This panel brings together leading experts in cryopreservation to discuss current advances and future directions in the field, with an emphasis on translational impact for cells, tissues, and organs. Panelists will address key challenges in preserving post-thaw function, scaling technologies, and enabling clinical and therapeutic applications. The discussion will also explore barriers to translation, emerging opportunities, and future predictions for the field, followed by an interactive exchange with the audience.
Session Chairs:
- Korkut Uygun, Harvard Medical School
- Dan Chen, NSF ATP-Bio
Panelists:
- Sebastian Giwa, Maximize Bio
- Laura Deming, Until Labs
- Gloria Elliott, ARPA-H
- Gregory Fahy, 21st Century Medicine, Inc.
- Dominika Wilczok, Duke University
This session is part of the Biopreservation Technologies Track.
Presentation Details
Sebastian Giwa, PhD
CEO
Maximize Bio
Bio: Dr. Giwa is a founder and the CEO of Maximize Bio. Prior cryopreservation companies that he founded have raised triple digit millions of dollars from VC, gotten FDA go-aheads and been featured as an NIH Success Story.
His background also includes research at world leading hedge fund Bridgewater, Bain and Goldman Sachs, and being a board member at NDN, one of the highest performing Organ Procurement Organizations in the world. He has spoken widely on regenerative medicine, including on Capitol Hill and at the White House.
Dr. Giwa holds a PhD in Economics (conducted at SSE and Harvard) and an MBA from Harvard where he was named a Baker Scholar, and he is a Fellow at the Institute for Engineering in Medicine at UMN.
Korkut Uygun, PhD
Professor of Surgery
Harvard Medical School
Director of Research
NSF ATP-Bio
Bio: Dr. Korkut Uygun is an internationally recognized leader in organ preservation and transplantation biotechnology. He serves as Director of Research for the NSF Engineering Research Center ATP-Bio and holds leadership roles at MGH and Shriners Children’s Boston. His pioneering work in supercooling and partial freezing has extended organ storage up to 30-fold beyond current standards and has been featured in Nature Biotechnology and major media outlets. Dr. Uygun has secured over $100M in research funding, filed 14 patents, and co-founded three biotech companies. He integrates engineering, medicine, AI, and ethics to advance equitable, next-generation transplantation systems.
Gloria Elliott, PhD
Program Manager
Scalable Solutions Office
Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)
Bio: Dr. Gloria Elliott joined the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as a Program Manager in the Scalable Solutions Office in January 2025 from the Organ Preservation Alliance where she served as president and Chief Science Officer. Prior to that, Elliott was the founding Chief Science Officer of Humanity Bio, a small biotechnology research company focused on human tissue preservation.
Dr. Elliott is a professor emerita at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her expertise is in cryobiology and biopreservation technology, especially non-refrigerated methods. She received her doctorate in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University and completed post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Engineering in Medicine.
Gregory Fahy, PhD
Executive Director
21st Century Medicine, Inc.
Bio: I am a cryobiologist and biogerontologist. As a biogerontologist, I published my first clinical trial of an aging intervention aimed at reversing immunosenescence, which also resulted in a number of signs of more global reversal of aging processes, including a 2.5-year reversal of epigenetic age (net change of -1.5 years vs time zero), in 2019. A confirmatory trial, the TRIIM-XA trial, has been completed and is now being fully analyzed, with promising preliminary results, and TRIIM-XB is now underway.
In cryobiology, my central interest is organ cryopreservation by vitrification. I pioneered the first practical approach to cryopreservation by vitrification, or ice-free preservation in the vitreous state, a field that has now been expanding exponentially for the last 4 decades. In 2009, I published the first report of indefinite life support by a vitrified vital mammalian organ, and in 2023, my lab reproduced this success, but with improved results (indefinite clinically normal renal function after transplantation.)
In 2010, I published an extended general argument for aging as a biologically controlled phenomenon in "The Future of Aging: Pathways to Human Life Extension" (Springer). Today's explosive and wide-ranging progress in what I call "interventive gerontology" is very consistent with the chapter's vision of aging as a process that can be largely controlled.
Bio pulled from LinkedIn Profile.
Dominika Wilczok, Senior Undergraduate Student
Senior Undergraduate Student in Neuroscience
Duke University and Duke Kunshan University
Bio: Dominika Wilczok is a senior undergraduate student in neuroscience at Duke University and Duke Kunshan University conducting research in cryobiology and longevity biotechnology. Her work focuses on the transcriptomic effects of brain tissue vitrification, cryoprotectant toxicity, and AI applications in cryopreservation, with broader interests in organ preservation. She has completed internships at the University of Minnesota and the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology. Before graduating, she has co-authored 10 publications and 2 book chapters, delivered a TEDx talk on the Handbook of Healthy Longevity, serves as a committee member of the International Cryobiology Young Researchers, cordinates to the Longevity Education Hub (13000+ physicians), which provides accredited longevity medicine education, and writes Regeneration.ai: a Substack covering key developments in longevity and cryobiology, along with investor-oriented perspectives on both fields.
Dan Chen, PhD
Strategic Partner and Innovation Director
NSF ATP-Bio
Bio: Dan holds B.S. and PhD. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He joined NSF ATP-Bio after 30 years at 3M, in R&D, Business Management and M&A.