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Life Preserver

Photo by Bridget Bennett
“There’s a massive gap between how many people get to benefit from a lifesaving organ transplant and how many truly need one,” says Sebastian Giwa (MBA 2009). He’s spent the last decade trying to change that.
In the United States alone, scientists estimate between 700,000 and 1 million people die each year because they don’t have access to an organ transplant. Worldwide, the World Health Organization estimates, only 10 percent of the need for organ transplantation is being met. But the issue isn’t a supply of organs; rather, it's the useful lifespan of an organ after it is removed from the human body. “We could literally multiply organ transplantation on Earth 15 or 20 times if we just were able to solve the logistics,” Giwa explains.
To address that, in 2012 Giwa helped to found and served as CEO of the Organ Preservation Alliance, a nonprofit established to advocate for additional funding for research into cryopreservation and connect scientists in the field. After leaving the Alliance, he founded two venture capital–backed, public benefit corporations—Ossium Health, a bone marrow bank (which he left in 2018), and Sylvatica Biotech, which develops preservation technology that could extend the useful life of transplant organs from a few hours to a few days or possibly even longer.
Sylvatica is named for the wood frog—scientific name Rana sylvatica—which can freeze each winter and emerge alive and active with the thaw up to 212 days later. “Nature has already solved this problem,” Giwa says. In Sylvatica and Harvard/Mass General Hospital partners’ laboratories, they’ve demonstrated success with human livers, frozen, thawed and, when hooked up to a simulated transplant model, fully functioning. “This could become the new way of doing transplantation,” he says.
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