Nectome, a company that preserves brains and bodies after death for possible future revival, plans to accept its first human clients in mid-January 2027 and reports raising about $3 million to study the method’s limits

Nectome, a company that preserves brains and bodies after death for possible future revival, plans to accept its first human clients in mid-January 2027 and reports raising about $3 million to study the method’s limits

On November 3, Nectome co-founder Aurelia Song published a year-end review on the LessWrong forum. The service will be available to terminally ill people who can travel to Portland, Oregon, and consent to medical aid in dying: a physician prescribes a lethal drug, which the patient takes themselves.

The preservation method Song developed requires starting while the person is still alive. End-of-life laws prohibit this, so she adapted it for use after death. Once the heart stops, a team performs perfusion: they flush blood out of the vessels and introduce a fixative, which stabilizes cell structure, and a cryoprotectant, a substance that prevents ice formation. Three conditions must be met: the heart must stop quickly, because a prolonged dying process damages the brain before cardiac arrest; heparin, a drug that prevents blood clotting, must be administered beforehand; and perfusion must begin within 12 minutes of cardiac arrest.

According to Song, the company identified this 12-minute window in rat experiments. Nectome’s preprint on pigs, a paper that has yet to undergo peer review, estimates the window at 14 minutes: when perfusion began 13,8 minutes after cardiac arrest, one pig’s brain was fixed with no apparent gaps in coverage, whereas the brains of two pigs remained largely unfixed when perfusion began after 18,3 and 22,8 minutes. The authors suggest a mechanism also seen in stroke: after blood flow stops, small blood vessels in the brain become blocked by clots and constrict.

Song initially thought the window in humans might be about two hours, which would have allowed her to integrate preservation into hospice care. But her best human case, a donor brain preserved 90 minutes after death, failed the assessment: according to Song, neuroscientist Ken Hayworth, co-founder of a foundation that evaluates brain preservation methods, concluded that the electron microscopy images did not allow synapses to be traced back to neurons. She judged the hospice model unworkable: preservation requires a planned death through medical aid in dying, because waiting for natural death would not allow the necessary conditions to be met. Song frames the limits of her method as three questions:

“What can we do if someone dies unexpectedly? Can we accept people who die in hospice, as well as those who receive medical aid in dying? Under what conditions, if any, can we extend the twelve-minute window for perfusion?”

Nectome approached Lightcone Commons, a platform that allocates donors’ funds to projects, with a proposal to study preservation under a wider range of conditions. Lightcone Infrastructure, the organization that runs the LessWrong forum, launched the platform in July. According to Song, Lightcone Commons considered the project promising enough to invest about $3 million; the company plans to spend that money in 2027 studying the limits of preservation.

According to the company, its first paid preservation procedure was performed on a dog with incurable cancer, and Nectome sold about 50 preorders worth $1,3 million from March to April. For those who missed that opportunity, it has opened its final sale to individuals of discount cards: for $29 thousand, buyers receive a card whose discount increases with the length of time they hold it; after ten years, preservation is free, while the current full price is $250 thousand. At most one hundred cards are available, and the sale runs until January 15. Song describes what a card could cost the company:

“If a sensible person buys a card today and uses it for free preservation in ten years, the procedure will cost us more than we received for the card (unless we have substantially reduced our costs by then).”