Step in the revival of dead brain

About 5 years ago, neuroscientist Zvonimir Vrselja at Yale Medical School and colleagues shocked the medical community with breakthrough experiments. They took the brain from the beginning of a pig in the slaughterhouse and removed all oxygen at room temperature for 4 hours. After that, they connect the brain to the resuscitation machine and revive it to a certain extent, according to Popular Mechanics.

The blood vessel system of the brain is a network of blood vessels that transport nutrients and oxygen to the brain through arteries and capillaries. Therefore, researchers use their brainex machine to pump a mixture of preservatives and drugs into dead pig brains, targeting the paths that are often destroyed due to oxygen loss. The mixture contains blood replacement substances containing molecules that balance the pH in the cell, the drug prevents the exaggerated immune response and antibiotics.

Some noticeable changes take place in the experiment. The gray cortex turns pink. Brain cells restore protein production. Neuron begins to show signs of metabolic activity as living cells. The brain once again performs basic cell function, except for awareness. However, the research team monitored the process that the brain no longer looked dead. This result “go against everything we know about death,” said Dr. Lance Becker, an expert on resuscitation, cardiac arrest and critical patient care, said.

After testing on pigs, Vrselja and colleagues are currently studying the donated brain with the Brainex machine. It is a more complex activity than experiments in pigs and has many moral consequences. For experiments in pigs, researchers ensure no brain activity is related to awareness. They put the sedative into the mixture to prevent electricity operations and end the experiment after 6 hours, according to the article announced in 2019 in Nature magazine. “We have to develop a new method to ensure no electrical activity occurs in an organized way, which can reflect awareness,” Vrselja said.

When working with the human brain, preventing cognitive activity requires more attention. If the human brain comes close to perception in such an experiment, the consequence will be very tough, according to Hank Greely, a biomedical legal expert at Stanford University in California.

VRSELJA said what the research team achieved so far is an important step to prove that brain death is not the final stage as we have thought, raising hope of saving the lives of patients in the boundary between the boundary between the boundary. Life and death.

At the same time, researchers have achieved some successes in maintaining a cell activity for up to 24 hours to be able to test the treatment of neurological syndrome. They hope to be able to help patients with Alzheimer and Parkinson’s disease.