People are right to ask where Tomorrow.bio members will actually be stored.
A contract is not a facility. A good website is not a facility. Even a skilled emergency team is only one part of the system.
At some point, the question becomes very physical: where does the patient go, who is responsible, and what is there to protect them?
The answer is the European Biostasis Foundation, or EBF, in Rafz, Switzerland.
EBF is Tomorrow.bio's sister organization and the long-term storage facility for our members. It has been operational since 2022 and already cares for patients and pets from several countries.
I understand why seeing a real place changes the conversation for people.
Cryopreservation can sound abstract until there is a building, a medical area, a CT scanner, cooling equipment, liquid nitrogen tanks and people doing the work.
But the building alone is not what makes EBF exceptional.
We consider EBF the most advanced operating human cryopreservation facility in the world because the whole system was designed around patient care: the infrastructure, engineering, quality measurements, research and long-term governance.
That is a strong claim. So let us show you what it is based on.
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This is our members' storage facility
Tomorrow.bio and EBF are separate organizations, but they were built as parts of the same biostasis ecosystem.
Tomorrow.bio manages membership, standby, stabilization, cryoprotection and transport. EBF receives patients in Switzerland, completes cooldown and imaging, and provides long-term cryogenic care.
This separation is deliberate. The company that moves quickly and operates emergency teams should not also own the patients, their care capital and every part of long-term storage.
Still, EBF is not a random contractor we found later.
It is our sister organization. This is the facility built to care for Tomorrow.bio members after the emergency operation is finished.
The building was handed over to EBF in March 2022. Its first public open house followed in October of the same year.
Operational since 2022 is the important phrase here. EBF is not a plan for a future facility or a rendering of something we hope to build.
It is where our patients are now.
As of August 2026, EBF cares for 28 patients, 11 cats and 3 dogs in cryogenic storage.
🧑 Patients: 28
- 🇩🇪 Germany: 13
- 🇪🇸 Spain: 4
- 🇦🇹 Austria: 3
- 🇺🇸 United States: 3
- 🇨🇳 China: 1
- 🇮🇳 India: 1
- 🇮🇱 Israel: 1
- 🇳🇱 Netherlands: 1
- 🇸🇪 Sweden: 1
🐕 Dogs: 3
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: 1
- 🇩🇪 Germany: 1
- 🇵🇱 Poland: 1
🐈 Cats: 11
- 🇩🇪 Germany: 5
- 🇵🇹 Portugal: 1
- 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: 1
- 🇸🇪 Sweden: 1
- 🇰🇷 South Korea: 1
- 🇫🇷 France: 1
- 🇺🇦 Ukraine: 1
Those numbers matter because they show an operating facility handling international cases. They are not the reason we call EBF best-in-class.
The reason is what happens around every patient.
The building was designed around the procedure
EBF owns both its building and the land beneath it.
This sounds like an unexciting property detail. It is actually a serious long-term decision.
A facility responsible for patients over an unknown period should not depend on a commercial landlord renewing a lease or deciding that the building has a more profitable use.
Rafz was selected carefully. The site has low exposure to flooding, groundwater, earthquakes, nearby nuclear facilities and crime.
It is also practical. The German border is close, Zurich Airport is roughly 30 to 40 minutes away, and an ambulance can drive directly into the building.
Inside, the work follows the patient.
The facility includes an ambulance garage, medical and imaging areas, a laboratory, computer-controlled cooldown equipment and a reinforced underground storage hall.
A patient arriving at around -80°C does not disappear behind a storage-room door.
Thermocouples inside different parts of the body track how temperatures change during cooldown. The system controls the descent towards cryogenic storage while operators watch the gradients across the patient.
After cooldown, every Tomorrow.bio human patient is CT-scanned while still submerged in liquid nitrogen.
This is one of the details I find especially important.
CT density can change with temperature. Scanning patients under the same cryogenic conditions makes comparisons between cases more standardized and more useful.
The scan can reveal regional density differences, gas, ice and fractures. Cooling curves and procedural data show another part of the case.
When consent allows it, neural microsamples and electron microscopy can examine membranes, synapses and local brain ultrastructure at a scale that CT cannot reach.
This wider approach is explained in our article on biostasis quality checks.
Honestly, this should be normal in cryopreservation.
If we claim that preserving biological structure is the objective, we should measure that structure with every method that can tell us something useful.
EBF makes that possible because patient care, imaging and research are not separated across distant institutions.
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Cryogenic storage is quiet, but it is not passive management
Once a patient reaches liquid-nitrogen temperature, the established classic storage system takes over.
The patients rest in large vacuum-insulated dewars filled with liquid nitrogen. Their cold does not depend on a continuously running refrigerator.
That is a beautifully simple thermal principle.
The operating system around it is more sophisticated.
EBF monitors nitrogen levels continuously, uses automatic replenishment, maintains redundant monitoring and remote supervision, and retains direct human intervention when needed.
Dewars are replenished on a weekly operating cadence. A 10,000-litre liquid-nitrogen tank on site provides bulk supply.
The storage hall also has a crane system for handling heavy equipment and dewars safely.
This combination is what we want: passive cryogenic stability, active monitoring, automation, redundancy and trained people who can step in.
EBF is also testing the first human-sized intermediate-temperature storage system delivered to a cryopreservation organization.
The system was designed and built by 21st Century Medicine and arrived in August 2026. It will spend several months in testing before any future patient use.
EBF is measuring nitrogen consumption, temperature stability, gradients, control behaviour and potential failure points.
That is how we approach new technology.
We do not move patients into a system because it sounds advanced. We test it, try to find where it fails, and build the operating knowledge first.
The potential benefit is important. Intermediate-temperature storage is designed to keep future patients below the glass-transition region without descending to -196°C, reducing thermal stress and fracturing.
The classic system remains the proven storage path for patients already in care. Innovation does not require us to pretend that established engineering suddenly stopped working.
The institution has to last longer than its founders
Equipment can be replaced. People eventually have to be replaced too.
This is the part of long-term storage that receives less attention because a nitrogen tank is easier to photograph than institutional design.
But for cryopreservation, governance is part of the technology.
The Patient Care Foundation is the legal guardian of each patient's body and the capital allocated to that patient's care.
It contracts EBF to provide storage. EBF owns the facility and runs the medical, imaging, research and cryogenic systems.
Tomorrow.bio remains responsible for serving members and operating the emergency side of cryopreservation.
If Tomorrow.bio ever changed ownership or ceased operating, the patients, their care capital and the Rafz facility would not become ordinary assets of the company.
That division of responsibility is developed in the Tomorrow.bio ecosystem.
EBF is a Swiss non-profit foundation. Its purpose is written into its statutes and regulations, including storing patients in biostasis and protecting them from harmful influences for an indefinite period.
Both EBF and the Patient Care Foundation publish annual financial accounts under their Swiss foundation obligations.
EBF also publishes its statutes, organizational rules, audit reports and activity reports. This is not decorative transparency.
It allows members, families and outsiders to inspect who is responsible, what the institution is legally required to do and how it develops over time.
We have thought a lot about organizations that may need to operate beyond the careers and lives of their founders.
The answer is not to find one heroic person and trust them forever. It is to create ownership, funding, rules and oversight that continue when the people change.
That is why EBF is best-in-class.
It combines a purpose-built and owned Swiss facility, integrated medicine and research, standardized cryogenic imaging, bulk nitrogen, continuous monitoring, tested redundancy and independent long-term patient governance.
More importantly, it has been doing the work since 2022.
When someone asks where Tomorrow.bio members are stored, we do not need to describe a future ambition.
We can show them.
TL;DR: EBF is Tomorrow.bio's Swiss sister organization and the long-term storage facility for our members. Operational since 2022, it is best-in-class because patient care, cryogenic engineering, quality measurement, research and independent long-term governance are built into one system.
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