Long-term storage sounds like the simplest part of biostasis. Once a patient reaches cryogenic temperature, the immediate biological race is over.
The remaining task is narrower but much longer: prevent warming, preserve identity and records, maintain funding, and keep the responsible institution aligned for an unknown period.
A credible storage system therefore needs more than a cold vessel. It needs a facility, operating procedures, capital, governance and a way to survive changes in personnel and companies.
.png)
The facility belongs to the European Biostasis Foundation
Tomorrow.bio does not own the place where its patients are stored.
The European Biostasis Foundation, or EBF, is a Swiss non-profit foundation based in Rafz, in the canton of Zurich.
EBF owns and operates the facility. It also owns both the building and the land beneath it, avoiding dependence on a commercial landlord.
The building was completed in March 2022. It includes an ambulance garage, medical area, laboratory, imaging infrastructure, offices and a large storage hall.
Patients are kept in an underground reinforced-concrete area within the facility, according to Tomorrow.bio’s published organizational structure.
EBF is not merely a warehouse contractor. Its statutory purpose includes biostasis research, development, application, education, tissue and organ storage, molecular engineering and cell-repair technology.
Three organizations, three different failure modes
The system separates the fast, commercial and adaptive work of providing cryopreservation from the slow work of patient custody and storage.
Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH
Tomorrow.bio manages membership, standby, stabilization, cryoprotective perfusion and transport to Switzerland.
It is a German operating company. Its job requires staff, vehicles, medical equipment and the ability to change procedures as evidence improves.
Patient Care Foundation
The Swiss Patient Care Foundation, or PCF, is the legal guardian of each cryopreserved patient’s body and the capital allocated to that patient’s continuing care.
PCF contracts EBF to provide storage. This separates patient capital from the operating company that performs new cases.
European Biostasis Foundation
EBF owns the physical facility, maintains the cryogenic infrastructure, provides patient storage and conducts research.
The separation matters because a provider can change ownership, strategy or commercial condition without automatically transferring ownership of the storage facility or patient-care capital.
It reduces correlated risk. It does not make any institution immortal.
Why Rafz was chosen
Long-horizon infrastructure should not be placed solely for present convenience. Site selection must consider risks that are rare in any one year but relevant across decades.
EBF’s facility assessment considered access, security, scalability, geology and long-term stability.
Rafz is near the German border and has road and rail connections. Zurich Airport is approximately 30 to 40 minutes away.
This matters during arrival and construction. It also allows staff, equipment, service companies and liquid-nitrogen deliveries to reach the site without unusual transport infrastructure.
EBF reports that the plot sits above nearby waterways, has permeable gravel subsoil and groundwater dozens of metres below the surface.
The canton of Zurich has comparatively low earthquake risk. EBF also notes the absence of a nearby nuclear power station and a low local crime rate.
These factors lower particular risks. They do not produce a zero-risk location, which does not exist.
What happens when a patient reaches Rafz
Arrival is a chain of custody, not simply a delivery.
In a standard planned case, the patient arrives after field cryoprotection and transport on dry ice. Other case conditions can require a modified preservation route.
Identity, documentation and the case record must remain associated with the correct patient throughout every transfer.
At the facility, the patient enters the computer-controlled cooldown from approximately -80°C to liquid-nitrogen temperature.
Multiple thermocouples record temperatures inside the patient while the control system manages the surrounding thermal environment.
The protocol moves quickly toward the glass-transition region, includes an annealing phase, then descends at approximately 1°C per hour to -196°C.
After cooldown, Tomorrow.bio performs standardized CT while the patient remains submerged in liquid nitrogen.
The scan estimates cryoprotectant distribution and can reveal ice, large fractures, gas and other macroscopic findings before final placement.
The complete temperature record and scan become part of the case-quality profile.
Facility operations: nitrogen, monitoring and maintenance
A dewar cannot be filled once and forgotten.
Operators must track nitrogen level, refill history, temperature, vessel condition, patient position and every movement affecting custody.
A serious record should also include alarms, inspections, maintenance, sensor calibration and deviations from normal operating conditions.
Liquid nitrogen introduces its own workplace hazard. Boil-off displaces oxygen, so ventilation, oxygen monitoring and controlled access are basic safety requirements for any occupied cryogenic facility.
Dewar handling is another engineering problem. These vessels and their contents are heavy, tall and not designed for casual movement.
EBF’s 2024 activity report documents a new crane system, expansion of automated nitrogen refilling, additional dewars and internal facility upgrades.
Those upgrades show what storage work looks like in practice: capacity, handling and replenishment improve incrementally rather than through one final design.
EBF has also installed a 10,000-litre outdoor liquid-nitrogen tank. It provides an on-site bulk supply for patient storage and routine dewar replenishment.
Automated filling can measure levels and add liquid nitrogen without waiting for a human refill round.
It reduces routine workload and the chance that an ordinary schedule interruption becomes a problem.
Automation creates components that can also fail: sensors, valves, controllers, pumps, power and software.
The correct architecture therefore retains inspection, alarms and a manual operating path. Automation should shorten response time, not become the only way to refill a vessel.
EBF publicly reports expansion of its automatic refilling system. Detailed redundancy and alarm specifications are not fully described on its public pages.
That distinction matters. A documented upgrade is evidence of capability, not evidence for every unstated safeguard.
Power independence has a precise meaning
It is common to say that liquid-nitrogen storage needs no electricity. Thermally, that is substantially correct.
It does not mean the facility has no electrical systems or that operations can continue indefinitely without staff and supplies.
A prolonged regional disruption could affect alarms, communications, deliveries, access or the equipment used to transfer nitrogen.
The useful claim is narrower: loss of grid power does not cause the storage vessels to stop cooling in the way an electric freezer would.
The nitrogen inventory and dewar hold time create a response window. The institution must use that window to restore normal operations.
EBF is also a research facility
Storage and research occupy the same site because preserving patients and improving preservation are connected responsibilities.
In 2024, EBF reported completing a whole-body CT scan at cryogenic temperature and expanding in-house analysis capabilities.
Its 2023 activity report documented support for blood-brain-barrier research, intermediate-temperature storage and volumetric ultrasound rewarming.
The medical area and laboratory allow equipment development, validation and case-quality work to happen near the storage infrastructure.
This does not authorize experimentation on patients. Any sampling or intervention requires the applicable contract, consent and governance process.
The value of co-location is operational learning: observed case limitations can inform research, and validated research can later improve procedures.
Why CT belongs at the storage facility
A scan performed after final cooldown answers a different question from perfusion telemetry collected in the ambulance.
Pressure, flow and refractive index describe the procedure. CT examines the distribution that resulted inside the patient.
Tomorrow.bio standardizes its scans by imaging every patient submerged in liquid nitrogen at approximately -196°C.
Keeping temperature constant removes a major confound in density-based comparison between cases.
CT still cannot resolve cell membranes or synapses. It is a whole-body macroscopic measurement that complements consented electron-microscopy samples.
This is why imaging infrastructure is not decorative medical equipment. It closes part of the feedback loop between procedure and evidence.
The financial architecture
Physical stability is irrelevant if nobody can pay for nitrogen, staff, insurance, maintenance and eventual equipment replacement.
Tomorrow.bio’s model allocates patient-care capital to PCF rather than asking relatives to pay recurring storage invoices.
PCF invests and manages that capital, then contracts and pays EBF for continuing storage.
This separates operating-company revenue from the assets intended to support people already in cryostasis.
Swiss reporting law requires both PCF and EBF to prepare annual financial accounts. Both foundations publish those accounts publicly each year.
This allows members and outside reviewers to inspect their assets, liabilities, income, expenses and reported financial position over time.
The model depends on investment returns, costs and institutional discipline over long periods. Those assumptions require conservative management and periodic review.
No present institution can empirically prove that its financing will survive for centuries. It can expose its assumptions and reduce obvious ways the money could be diverted.
What Swiss foundation law contributes
EBF is established under Article 80 and following of the Swiss Civil Code.
Its published statutes bind its assets to its non-profit purpose and require careful, diversified asset management.
They require independent auditors. The board submits annual accounts, the audit report and the activity report to the Swiss supervisory authority.
If EBF is dissolved, remaining assets must pass to one or more Swiss tax-exempt organizations with the same or a closely similar purpose.
The assets cannot return to the founders.
EBF’s organizational regulations define voting thresholds, conflicts of interest, financial authority, meeting requirements and reporting duties.
These rules make mission drift and private extraction harder. They cannot remove every governance risk or guarantee that future people make good decisions.
What happens if Tomorrow.bio disappears
The operating company disappearing would be serious for future standby and new procedures. It would not make EBF’s building, dewars or foundation cease to exist.
Existing patients are held through the separate PCF and EBF structure. Their capital and storage contracts are not ordinary assets of Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH.
The practical resilience comes from this separation, not from assuming the current company will remain unchanged forever.
Success would still require PCF and EBF to maintain staff, suppliers, records and competent governance.
See what happens if Tomorrow.bio ceases operations for the full institutional analysis.
What can be inspected today
Claims about centuries cannot be verified in advance. Present design and behaviour can.
EBF publishes its statutes, organizational regulations, board structure, activity reports and financial audit reports. PCF also publishes its annual financial accounts.
Its facility page documents the site, construction, ownership and internal areas. Annual reports record storage activity, infrastructure additions and supported research.
Tomorrow.bio publishes its organizational structure, procedure descriptions and selected case-quality information.
This evidence does not prove indefinite survival. It allows a reader to distinguish an operating institution with inspectable infrastructure from a promise without machinery behind it.
The honest long-term claim
At -196°C, meaningful biological change is expected to be extremely slow. That makes long-duration storage physically plausible.
The harder uncertainty is institutional: whether people, funding, supply chains and governance continue protecting that physical state.
EBF addresses the problem through passive cryogenic storage, owned infrastructure, separate patient funding, Swiss foundation governance, published reporting and continuing technical development.
That is a serious architecture for a long-horizon task. It is not a scientific guarantee of revival or institutional permanence.
TL;DR: Long-term storage combines passive liquid-nitrogen cooling with monitoring, records, funding, governance and trained staff. The cold is passive, but the institution around it requires continuous management.
Take the cryopreservation guide with you
Get a practical guide to the procedure, its limits and the decisions involved.
Loading the interactive tool...
Further reading