HibernetX is building the first integrated platform to place humans into a safe, controlled, and reversible state of torpor, using breakthrough pharmacology and autonomous control systems to unlock what nature has known for millions of years.
Bears, squirrels, lemurs, bats, and dozens of other mammals can enter a state of torpor, dramatically lowering their heart rate, body temperature, and metabolism for weeks or months at a time, then wake up healthy. Humans already carry the genetic machinery to do the same thing. Evolution simply switched it off.
HibernetX exists to switch it back on with a life support system platform that can safely induce, maintain, and reverse a state of human suspended animation.
"You get a state of suspended animation and the creatures do not pass away, and that's the basis of what we see as an alternative way to think about critical care medicine. What you want to do is to have the patient's time slowed down, while everyone around them [like doctors] move at what we would call real time."
— Mark Roth PhD, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle WAOur platform integrates two breakthrough pillars: novel drugs to induce a hibernation-like state, and an autonomous delivery device to monitor and control it in real time.
A proprietary compound library designed to activate multiple biological pathways simultaneously, creating the conditions for the body to safely enter a deep metabolic slowdown, including controlled shifts in temperature regulation, heart rate, and cellular energy demand.
An intelligent medical device that continuously reads multi-modal vital signs, uses AI to compute a real-time picture of metabolic and consciousness state, predicts where the patient is heading, and autonomously adjusts drug delivery to maintain the exact depth of stasis the clinician specifies.
The full HibernetX system unifies drug and device into one seamless architecture: compounds are designed for the device, and the device is built around the pharmacological protocol. From induction through sustained hibernation to safe, controlled awakening, every step is orchestrated as a single closed loop.
Controlled human hibernation opens entirely new paradigms, beginning with immediate, life-saving applications in the operating room and extending to the most ambitious frontier in human exploration.
Today's anesthesia keeps patients unconscious, but their metabolism runs at full speed, burning energy, accumulating cellular stress, and degrading tissue during prolonged procedures and ICU stays. A hibernation-like state fundamentally changes the equation: by deeply suppressing metabolism, we can protect the body during complex surgeries lasting many hours, dramatically reduce the cellular damage that accumulates during extended critical care, and give physicians a vastly expanded window to stabilize and treat the most severely ill patients. Where current sedation simply turns off awareness, controlled metabolic suppression turns down the entire biological clock. The HACA trial demonstrated that even mild cooling to 32–34°C after cardiac arrest improved favorable neurological outcomes from 39% to 55% and reduced six-month mortality from 55% to 41% (HACA Study Group, NEJM, 2002). True torpor-level suppression — going far beyond what therapeutic hypothermia achieves — could represent a revolutionary improvement in surgical and critical care neuroprotection.
A crew in suspended animation needs a fraction of the food, water, oxygen, and living space of an awake crew , slashing mission mass, cost, and spacecraft size by potentially half or more. Hibernation may also shield astronauts from cosmic radiation, prevent bone and muscle wasting, and eliminate the psychological toll of years of confinement in a small capsule. NASA, ESA, and commercial spaceflight organizations have all funded research into crew hibernation for Mars-class missions. HibernetX is building the technology to make it real. ESA's Concurrent Design Facility study concluded that reducing crew metabolic rate to 25% of normal through torpor would dramatically cut the supplies, habitat volume, and mass required for a Mars-class mission (ESA, 2019). Separately, NASA's NIAC-funded SpaceWorks study showed that a torpor habitat for a crew of four could reduce transit vehicle mass by 50% or more compared to an active-crew architecture (Bradford & Schaffer, NIAC, 2014).
When a soldier suffers a battlefield injury, or a patient experiences a stroke or cardiac arrest, the most critical factor is time. Inducing rapid metabolic suppression could extend the treatment window from minutes to hours, preserving brain and organ function during prolonged field evacuation or transport to definitive care. A biological pause button for the most urgent medical and combat emergencies. Tisherman and colleagues at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center are currently testing Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR), which uses profound hypothermia (~10°C) to buy up to 2 hours of circulatory arrest time for trauma patients who would otherwise face less than 7% survival (Tisherman et al., Ann NY Acad Sci, 2022). In preclinical models, EPR with enhanced solutions enabled intact neurological recovery after 3 hours of cardiac arrest from exsanguination (Wu, Drabek, Tisherman, Kochanek et al., J Cereb Blood Flow Metab, 2008). True synthetic torpor could extend these windows further still.
Donor organs currently have a viability window of just 4 to 36 hours. Thousands are discarded annually because they cannot reach a recipient in time. Metabolic suppression at the cellular level could extend organ viability from hours to days, transforming transplant logistics and saving thousands of lives each year. Current cold ischemia tolerances are severe: approximately 6 hours for the heart, 8 hours for the lung, 12–15 hours for the liver, and 24 hours for the kidney, with prolonged ischemia an independent risk factor for graft nonfunction (reviewed in Giwa et al., Nature Biotech, 2017). Early hibernation research demonstrated that the delta opioid peptide DADLE and the Hibernation Induction Trigger (HIT) could dramatically extend multi-organ preservation in en bloc preparations, including lung, heart, liver, and kidney (Chien, Oeltgen, Su et al., J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg, 1991; Borlongan, Su & Wang, J Biomed Sci, 2000). Achieving true torpor-like metabolic arrest in donor tissue could fundamentally expand the organ supply.
Emerging research directly links hibernation-like states to measurably slowed biological aging. Jayne, Hrvatin and colleagues at MIT/Whitehead Institute demonstrated that inducing a torpor-like state in mice slows epigenetic aging by 37% across multiple tissues and extends healthspan, identifying decreased body temperature as the central driver (Jayne et al., Nature Aging, 2025). In primates, fat-tailed dwarf lemurs — our closest hibernating relatives — live far longer than non-hibernating species their size, with the oldest on record reaching 29 years at the Duke Lemur Center. Recent work shows their telomeres actually lengthen during hibernation (Blanco et al., Biology Letters, 2025). These findings point toward a future where controlled metabolic suppression could reshape human aging itself.
HibernetX builds on a robust and rapidly advancing body of scientific work spanning comparative genomics, circuit neuroscience, thermoregulatory physiology, and pharmacology.
A phased development plan to bring human hibernation from early-stage research and development to clinical reality and beyond.