The National Institutes of Health has given their ethical approval to a Philadelphia based biotech company that is looking to regenerate dead brain cells in patients that have been declared brain dead. The Bioquark company believes that it can use stem cells to resurrect the dead.
It will be called the ReAnima project and Bioquark researchers look to be able to regenerate someone who is brain dead in a similar fashion to such creatures as salamanders who are capable of regenerating lost limbs and parts of its brain after loss or damage to them.
The company has been cleared to look for 20 patients that have been medically declared to be brain dead and, with family permission, will begin their experiments to try and regenerate a dead nervous system. The researchers will try and stimulate the brain with weekly doses of amino acids and lasers as well as stimulation techniques similar to those that have been used successfully with comatose patients. The patients will have been declared legally and medically dead and will only be kept alive through life support systems. The experiments will continue over the course of many months following the six weeks of initial treatments by the researchers.
The CEO of Bioquark, Ira Pastor, said, “This represents the first trial of its kind and another step towards the eventual reversal of death in our lifetime.”
The experiments will take place at a hospital in India where the company has already been given permission from Indian authorities to begin their work there. They hope to have some initial results in 90 days or so from the start of the procedures.
Brain death, apparently, happens when the brain’s stem can no longer function at all. By doing so, the body can no longer breathe on its own. With life support systems, however, the body can still generate the electricity needed to perform many of the functions of being alive. Bioquark hopes that its efforts will lead to more advanced techniques and treatments for such afflictions as Parkinson’s vegetative states, comas and even Alzheimer’s.
“It’s a long term vision of ours,” said Pastor, “that a full recovery in such patients is a possibility although that is not the focus of this first study – but it is a bridge to that eventuality.”
PHOTO SOURCE: Marcus Dall Col (Unsplash.com)