A U.S. biotech company has received permission from an Institutional Review Board in the U.S. and India to experiment on 20 brain dead patients to determine if they can restart their brains.
IFLScience.com is reporting on the controversial new research to be conducted by the U.S. based Bioquark, Inc., which will involve a team of therapists who will test a combination of therapies on patients who have been certified as brain dead to see if they can stimulate their nervous systems in order restart their brains.
Although there is little or no evidence that this can be done, the team of experts who will be working on the initiative includes some of the world’s best, such as Dr. Calixto Machado, a well-known neurological researcher and member of the American Academy of Neurology who has written extensively on brain death.
Machado’s team will test several methods on the patients such as injecting the brain with stem cells, infusing the spinal cord with beneficial chemicals, and nerve stimulation techniques which have been used to bring people out of comas.
IFL reports that after each therapy has been administered, researchers will monitor the brain activity of the participants for several months, hoping for signs of neurological reactivation. Their main focus will be on the upper spinal cord, which is the lowermost part of the brain stem that controls a person’s heartbeat and breathing.
Dr Ira Pastor, the CEO of Bioquark Inc. said: “This represents the first trial of its kind and another step towards the eventual reversal of death in our lifetime,” he told the Telegraph. “We just received approval for our first 20 subjects and we hope to start recruiting patients immediately from this first site – we are working with the hospital now to identify families where there may be a religious or medical barrier to organ donation.”
He added: To undertake such a complex initiative, we are combining biologic regenerative medicine tools with other existing medical devices typically used for stimulation of the central nervous system, in patients with other severe disorders of consciousness. We hope to see results within the first two to three months.”
The first trials will take place at Anupam Hospital in India. These will involve giving the brain-dead patients infusions of peptides, chemicals that can act as neurotransmitters, as well as biweekly injections of stem cells.
“It is a long-term vision of ours that a full recovery in such patients is a possibility, although that is not the focus of this first study,” Pastor added. “But it is a bridge to that eventuality.”
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