You can now pay a company to keep some of your immune cells in a freezer.

The hope is that future medicine will find a use for them. You keep getting older. The sample stays in storage.

It sounds like backing up your younger self. And, like most things with a subscription attached, the interesting part is in the details.

I am Alex. Welcome to ShortCu8 by Innov8.

Let's dive in.

Reservoir launched on October 15. It comes from the team behind Cellino, co-founded by Nabiha Saklayen and Marinna Madrid. Cellino's backers include Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla's investment firm.

The service collects blood, separates immune cells and freezes them below minus 150°C. Customers retain ownership, and retrieval happens on their instruction with a licensed physician involved.

Its website lists $4,995, including the first year of storage, followed by $270 a year. Availability is currently limited to selected US locations.

That buys preservation. Reservoir explicitly says it does not promise any future use for the cells.

So the purchase is a bet: if a suitable treatment arrives later, having this sample might turn out to be useful. The launch announcement does not establish that it will.

I can understand why the idea appeals. It offers something to do now about a future you cannot control. That is also why the promise deserves a careful read.

There is another cell story worth putting beside this one.

How does a developing cell end up helping build a lung instead of another tissue?

Cells receive chemical signals from their neighbours. Those signals affect gene activity and help guide what the cells become. Researchers want to work backwards from a cell's current state to understand the instructions it received.

A team led by MIT and Whitehead Institute researchers Pulin Li and Nicholas Hutchins developed an AI model called IRIS to help do that. Their paper appeared in Nature Methods on September 8; MIT covered it this week.

IRIS learns patterns in gene activity associated with different signals. Researchers can then use those patterns to infer signaling activity in other cells. Think of reading the marks left by an instruction, rather than finding a recording of the original conversation.

The team trained it using experiments on human stem cells and applied it to data from mouse embryos. That distinction matters: this was a study of developing cells, not a test of Reservoir's stored adult immune cells.

IRIS helped identify a signal involved in producing a cell type important for lung development. Experiments in mouse embryos supported the prediction, according to MIT's report.

Knowing those instructions could help researchers make better lung tissue models in the lab. Those models could be useful for studying disease and testing potential treatments. It does not mean scientists can now grow you a replacement lung on demand.

This is the part of the story I find exciting. There is a prediction, an experiment and a result to examine. You can ask what worked and what still needs testing.

Putting these stories together makes the ambition easy to see. Scientists are trying to understand how cells develop. A business is offering to preserve cells while customers wait for medicine to advance.

But IRIS does not validate Reservoir's service. Cellino's work on AI-driven cell manufacturing is another part of its business; Reservoir itself sells storage. The company keeps those services separate.

Before treating a frozen sample like health insurance, I would want answers to some ordinary questions. What future treatment could use it? What evidence supports collecting it this way? What happens to the sample if the storage company closes?

The appeal is being able to save something today that you cannot go back and collect later.

Whether that becomes a useful medical option is the part nobody can put in the freezer for you.

We read every reply - just reply to this email and let us know how we can improve !

#AD1

If you have paid time left on an individual Granola plan, we'll match it with a Wispr Flow subscription that includes Notetaker and dictation, and add bonus time, up to 12 months total. Sign in or create a Wispr account and submit proof of your plan to check eligibility.

Try Notetaker Free

#AD2

How do you maintain your distinct brand qualities while answering the endless velocity, volume, and variety demands?

Join our honest discussion on this evolution with Ari Murray, Chief Digital Officer at Salt and Stone, and get 5 tips for expert LLM prompting with ready-to-run prompts.

Join the talk