Organ Preservation Alliance
Zak Allal's pitch at Singularity University, building organ banks, ending the transplant waiting list, and what longevity actually requires
Source: YouTube, Singularity University, NASA Ames Research Park. Conducted in English.
About this Pitch
Delivered to Zak's own Singularity University cohort and broader community, this pitch opens with a clinical story he has carried with him: a young girl seen during heart-surgery rotations, eventually needing a transplant, the parents' devastation in the consult room. The story sets up the scale of the problem the Organ Preservation Alliance was founded to attack.
What the Pitch Covers
The scale of the problem
Three times more people on transplant waiting lists than registered donors. Roughly 900,000 Americans, about 35% of US national death, could in principle be saved with viable transplants. The WHO estimates only 10% of global organ-transplant need is actually met. The gap is global.
Organ banks as infrastructure
The vision: distributed banks across California, New York, Europe, and Asia where you can store a heart, kidney, or liver grown from your own stem cells. If something happens at 80, you're transplanted with a 25-year-old version of yourself. Soldiers and firefighters get organs ready in case of injury. Untreatable chronic diseases become solvable by replacement.
An X Prize-style incentive
The Alliance accelerates the field through a multi-million-dollar incentive prize for the first institution or individual who demonstrates long-term storage of a human-sized organ with proven survivability and function, built in partnership with the Institute of Competition Sciences (previously involved with X Prize and NASA).
An institute, not just a prize
Around the prize the Alliance builds an Institute: convening world experts in cryobiology, hosting symposia and hackathons, issuing targeted grants, and surrounding scientists with the investor, NGO, and government ecosystem they need to move from bench to bank.
Q&A, technology, donors, and on-demand organs
Zak emphasizes the technical work is mostly cryobiology, real science, not cryonics. On the donor-incentive question, his honest take is that successful organ engineering may eventually disrupt the donor framing entirely, you just grow your own. On whether banks are even needed if growth becomes on-demand: a fair point worth keeping open, though storage remains a central piece of the framework today.