BIOTIME FEATURED IN WIRED
By John Bull
How low temperature surgery could kick-start the cryo game.
Preceded by an eye-catching graphic of a male nude resting in a giant ice cube, the article, written by Wil McCarthy reports on BioTime’s two main products, Hextend and HetaFreeze, and then gets into some cryonics bashing. It closes with an upbeat assessment on the future of cryo surgery.
Major surgery can be hell on a patient and procedures that require interrupting blood flow can be the worst because they starve the body of oxygen. One way to avoid these issues is to minimize the body’s oxygen demand, and the simplest way to do this is to cool the affected tissues. This has spurred a billion dollar industry in therapeutic hypothermia, in which a dozen firms hustle for market position. These companies have developed any number of devices, but they all have one shortcoming—they just cool a specific area. One drops a patient’s core temperature as low as 90 degrees. Any lower and blood thickens to sludge.
"It’s here that BioTime stands out from the pack. The company has developed a process that cools living bodies much further than that. Fifty-six degrees further, in fact, right down to the brink of freezing—a state in which the brain takes hours, not minutes, to wither.
BioTime’s secret is astoundingly obvious: antifreeze. The company’s flagship product, Hextend is an FDA approved blood volume expander designed to maintain blood pressure and chemistry in the wake of massive blood loss. BioTime has been testing Hextend in baboons, pigs and dogs, replacing their entire blood supply and then cooling them to 35 degrees. At that point vital signs cease. Bleeding virtually stops. Oxygen hungry tissues go on a diet. Then technicians raise the body temperature, reintroduce the blood, and shock the heart back to life. Right now, we can easily bring animals back from two hours of absolute clinical death," says Hal Sternberg, BioTime’s VP of research. "No pulse, no respiration, no measurable brain activity."
The company’s other main product, Hetafreeze, described as a cryoprotectant is still undergoing testing. So far they’ve been able to freeze tissue-- skin and hair, without cell destruction. It may allow whole organs, such as hearts, and even intact (but brain dead) organ donors to survive partial freezing.
"Clinical death for up to 15 minutes has been reversible since the 1952 invention of the defibrillator, now BioTime is on the brink of extending that limit to hours. But with the envelope pushing out further and further, the momentum is carrying the company into stranger territory. Especially given that Sternberg and his colleagues are longtime members of the cryonics movement, whose techno-utopian frozen head agenda is well known."
After describing the company’s experiments with vitrification, the article gets back to cryonics bashing. "Nonetheless, the medical establishment has shunned advocates of freezing bodies for eventual revival. And who can blame them. Cryonics is just plain creepy." It rehashes the whole Ted Williams/Larry Johnson/Sports Illustrated fiasco.
McCarthy softens his tone a little towards the end, "as far as anyone knows, there’s nothing physically impossible about reviving a frozen head. Still, when you get down to it, Alcor and Trans Time are taking money for a service that may never exist, and that even the companies estimate is 150 years down the road. BioTime is approaching the problem from the other end-the respectable end-by working to extend established medical procedures. The immediate benefit will be preventing untimely death in the here and now, which is completely different proposition than reviving the already dead."
For the fiscal quarter ending March 31, 2004 Biotime announced a 20% increase in royalty revenue from Hextend sales by Abbott Laboratories. "Hextend sales to the U.S. Armed Forces during the first three months of this year contributed to a significant portion of the increase in royalties we received," said JudithSegall, BioTime Vice President of Operations, Office of the President. Hextend is the preferred resuscitation fluid of the U.S. Special Operations Command.
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