Welcome back to Healthy Innovations! 👋
Anyone who knows me knows I hate the cold – which makes it even funnier that I just spent the past week deep inside the Arctic Circle.
I was visiting stunning Svalbard, a Norwegian island about a three-hour flight north of Oslo, home to the world’s northernmost town, Longyearbyen. Depending on the season, it swings between polar day (months without darkness) and polar night (months without light).
Lunch stop during our snow mobiling tour from Longyearbyen.
So what better topic for today’s newsletter than cold therapy! Long treated as an enemy of the body, extreme cold is becoming one of its most promising research tools. In precision brain cooling, organ cryopreservation, and cold shock biology, extreme temperature is opening doors that conventional pharmacology has struggled to unlock.
Let's dive in!
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Cooling the brain: from blunt tool to precision therapy
When someone's heart stops, every minute without oxygen pushes the brain toward permanent damage. Targeted Temperature Management (TTM) cools patients to between 89.6°F (32°C) and 96.8°F (36°C) after cardiac arrest. Cellular metabolism slows, toxic inflammatory cascades are suppressed, and neurons get time they would otherwise not have.
For years, aggressive cooling to a fixed target was standard practice.
Recent trials complicated that picture. A 2025 paper in JACC: Advances from the University of Miami reflects where thinking has landed: the question is no longer "should we cool?" but "who benefits, and to what temperature?" The paper makes the case for personalized temperature targets, matched to the severity of each patient's brain injury rather than a single protocol applied across the board.
Two 2025 developments show where the technology is heading:
A thermoelectric craniocerebral cooling helmet developed in Turkey, published in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine, showed meaningful neurological recovery in post-cardiac arrest patients using localized brain cooling.
In Sweden, the PRINCESS2 trial is testing on-scene brain cooling in ventricular fibrillation cardiac arrest, starting the protective process before patients reach hospital.
Organ banking: solving transplantation's time problem
Every year, thousands of donated organs are discarded. Hearts and livers are viable for just 4–12 hours after procurement; kidneys last 24–36 hours at most. These narrow windows force patients to live near transplant centers and make biological matching a secondary concern to timing.
Vitrification could change that.
Rather than conventional freezing, which creates damaging ice crystals, vitrification cools tissue to a stable, glass-like state for indefinite storage. The challenge has always been rewarming: too slow and crystals re-form; too uneven and thermal stress cracks the organ.
Nanowarming addresses both.
Iron-oxide nanoparticles loaded into an organ's vasculature heat uniformly under an alternating magnetic field. Researchers at the University of Minnesota demonstrated that vitrified rat kidneys stored for up to 100 days could be transplanted with full renal function restored. A November 2025 Nature Communications study pushed vitrification to three-liter volumes and nanowarming to two liters, approaching the scale of a human liver. Separately, Texas A&M engineers showed in Scientific Reports that modifying vitrification solution chemistry reduces the thermal cracking that destroys tissue during cooling.
Until Labs, founded in San Francisco by Laura Deming and Hunter Davis, is building the clinical infrastructure to bring this to patients. Their roadmap runs from organ-scale cryopreservation products through to large-animal trials. The company describes its mission as building a pause button for biology.
Image source: Until Labs
Cold shock proteins: what hibernating animals know that we don't
When mammals hibernate, falling body temperatures trigger production of cold shock proteins, the best-studied of which is RBM3. In healthy brains, RBM3 protects synapses during cooling and drives their regrowth on rewarming. Hibernating animals lose and rebuild synaptic connections every season without lasting consequence.
Researchers at the UK Dementia Research Institute, University of Cambridge, showed this process breaks down in mouse models of Alzheimer's and prion disease. The brain loses its ability to produce RBM3 in response to cold, and synapses are never rebuilt. Restoring RBM3 levels reversed that deficit and slowed neurodegeneration significantly.
The more striking finding came in 2023. Research in EMBO Molecular Medicine by scientists from Cambridge and Freie Universität Berlin showed that a single injection of antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs), gene therapy tools that modify RNA processing, raised RBM3 levels in prion-diseased mice without any cooling at all. Seven of eight treated mice showed extensive preservation of neurons in the hippocampus. Professor Giovanna Mallucci described it as the brain being enabled to protect itself. Professor Florian Heyd noted the potential for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, conditions with no reliable preventative treatments.
The research is now expanding on two fronts:
ALS/MND scientists are testing whether RBM3 induction can protect synapses early in motor neuron disease, before symptoms appear.
The UK Dementia Research Institute is running studies with cold-water swimmers, measuring whether RBM3 is inducible in human blood, a step needed before human trials can be designed.
One note from Professor Mallucci: none of this is an argument for unsupervised cold exposure. The goal is a drug that triggers the protective response without any temperature change.
The cold logic
Cold exposes biological mechanisms that normal conditions keep hidden.
Across all three fields, researchers have learned to work with it rather than against it, and the result is a shift in how we think about protection, preservation, and recovery.
Each area is still early. Each is accelerating. The next few years will reveal how much of today’s laboratory promise translates into real-world care.
Innovation highlights
❤️ AI spots the sneaky heart killer. Cardiac amyloidosis – a life-threatening condition caused by abnormal protein deposits in the heart – is routinely missed because its symptoms mimic more common heart conditions. Anumana just received FDA clearance for the first-ever AI algorithm designed to catch it from a standard ECG. Validated across more than 15,000 adults, the model hit 78.9% sensitivity and 91.2% specificity. Best of all, it plugs directly into existing clinical workflows – no extra testing required.
🦠 Skin bugs caught in action. Scientists have cracked a major hurdle in microbiome research – they can now read RNA directly from microbes living on human skin, revealing not just which bugs are present, but what they're actually doing. Published in Nature Biotechnology, the study found that highly active microbes aren't always the most abundant, that skin microbes switch on different genes depending on body site, and that some produce antimicrobial compounds – including previously unknown ones. Acne, eczema, and psoriasis research could follow.
💡 Bright light, happy heart. Researchers in China found that intense light therapy can protect the right ventricle from hypoxia-induced damage – the kind seen in chronic lung disease and high-altitude conditions. In mouse models, light exposure reduced heart enlargement, lowered pulmonary artery pressure, and cut collagen buildup. The mechanism? Light reprogrammed cardiac macrophages from inflammatory to protective, specifically suppressing PF4+ immune cells that drive right ventricular dysfunction.
🔬 Tiny tech, big cancer fight. Breast cancer accounts for 30% of all cancers in women, and treating it – especially the aggressive triple-negative subtype – has long frustrated oncologists. Nanotechnology is changing that. By shrinking drug particles to between 1 and 100 nanometers, researchers are getting treatments directly to tumors with far less collateral damage to healthy tissue. One oral formulation improved bioavailability by more than 3.5-fold, while another hit 62% tumor inhibition versus 31% for conventional treatment.
Weird and wonderful
💇 Your hair knows your bedtime. Researchers at Berlin's Charité hospital can now read your body's internal clock from a few strands of hair. Their test – called HairTime – analyzes 17 genes in hair follicle cells and uses machine learning to pinpoint exactly where you are in your 24-hour biological rhythm. One sample is all it takes, and participants collected theirs at home.
The science matters: Prof. Achim Kramer's team found that when certain cancer immunotherapies are administered can substantially affect how well they work, because the immune system runs on its own 24-hour schedule. Across 4,000 participants, biological timing varied by age, sex, genetics, and one surprise: employed people's internal clocks run about 30 minutes earlier than those who aren't working. Apparently your job is literally resetting your biology.
Thank you for reading the Healthy Innovations newsletter!
Keep an eye out for next week’s issue, where I will highlight the healthcare innovations you need to know about.
Have a great week!
Alison ✨
