This might be the secret that unlocks real-life human hibernation

One way that animals like bears deal with food scarcity, especially during winter, is to hibernate. This allows them to conserve their energy by slowing their heart rate and even dropping their body temperature to temperatures as low as five degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit). But this particular condition is only survivable if the animal’s blood can continue to flow without issue, supplying oxygen to their body. And if we can unlock how that works, perhaps human hibernation could be possible, too.

Now, thanks to new research published in PNAS, scientists appear to have finally made some progress in understanding how hibernation works. Most notably, they seem to have discovered more information about how specific blood cells change to allow for hibernation to happen effectively while still keeping the blood flowing efficiently.

The revelation comes thanks to experiments that tested human red blood cells and the red blood cells taken from Egyptian fruit bats and common noctule bats. The latter is known for hibernating, while Egyptian fruit bats do not hibernate. The researchers decided to test how the red blood cells change as they cooled the blood, to see if human red blood cells would allow for hibernation.

They found that when cooling the red blood cells of both, the cells became less elastic and more viscous as the temperature dropped from 37 degrees Celsius to 23 degrees Celsius in all three samples. However, when they cooled it further to 10 degrees Celsius, the cells taken from both bats continued the metamorphosis. However, the human red blood cells did not.

Even though the Egyptian fruit bats don’t hibernate, their red blood cells were able to slowly transform to adapt to the lower temperatures, allowing the blood to continue working as it needs to in order to keep them alive. The hope, then, is that perhaps scientists could find some type of drug or drug cocktail that could induce the human blood cells to do something similar, allowing them to allow for human hibernation.

This would be great for slowing down the metabolism of patients who may need major organ transplants, brain surgery, or other surgical procedures that can take a while to pull off. By being able to prolong the amount of time that the human blood cells could be cooled, these people could hibernate until their treatment is available.

There are also other benefits that human hibernation could allow for—like putting people into a kind of stasis while they travel long distances through space. Considering it will take at least six months to even send humans to Mars, any deeper space travels involving humans could benefit significantly from a type of hibernation system.