There's the field of cryonics, aimed at preserving people who can't be helped by contemporary medicine, in hopes that the future technology will be able to save their lives. While the goal is slightly different, it seems to be pretty much the same research that's needed for space travel cryopreservation.
There's at least one very big difference: the equipment for reactivating the frozen tissue, which modern cryonics does not even attempt to create, needs to be put on the spaceship at launch. Otherwise, even if perfectly preserved tissue arrives at its destination in a few centuries, it will just remain in that state until power runs down or something breaks.
