The first attempts to bring people back from the dead are slated to
start this year. Bioquark, a Philadelphia-based company, announced in
late 2016 that they believe brain death is not ‘irreversible’.
And
now, CEO Ira Pastor has revealed they will soon be testing an
unprecedented stem cell method on patients in an unidentified country in
Latin America, confirming the details in the next few months.
To
be declared officially dead in the majority of countries, you have to
experience complete and irreversible loss of brain function, or ‘brain
death’.
According to Pastor, Bioquark has developed a series of
injections that can reboot the brain – and they plan to try it out on
humans this year.They have no plans to test on animals first. The inaugural stage of the trial will likely follow the plans laid out
last year for a trial in India, which was thwarted. Initially, Pastor
and his collaborator Himanshu Bansal, an orthopedic surgeon, planned to
carry out the first tests in India. Days after announcing their
ambitions, the plan was blocked by the Indian Council of Medical
Research, urging the duo to take their trials somewhere else.
However, the study record detail gave the wider public an idea as to how
they plan to approach the trials. The first stage, named ‘First In
Human Neuro-Regeneration & Neuro-Reanimation’ was slated to be a
non-randomized, single group ‘proof of concept’ study.
The team
said they planned to examine individuals aged 15-65 declared brain dead
from a traumatic brain injury using MRI scans, in order to look for
possible signs of brain death reversal. Specifically, they planned to
break it down into three stages.
First, they would harvest stem
cells from the patient’s own blood, and inject this back into their
body. Next, the patient would receive a dose of peptides injected into
their spinal cord. Finally, they would undergo a 15-day course of nerve
stimulation involving lasers and median nerve stimulation to try and
bring about the reversal of brain death, whilst monitoring the patients
using MRI scans.
The idea of consent in this context is complicated, since the patients
are all technically dead. However, the definition of death is also more
blurry than it once was. Confirming death used to be straightforward:
when the heart stopped beating, a person was unresponsive and no longer
breathing, they were dead.
Now it is more complex, since we have
more advanced ways to keep oxygen pumping through the body, keeping the
brain stem functioning – for example, by keeping a person on a
ventilator. It means that most countries today, including the US and the
UK, identify death as permanent loss of brain stem function.
The Bioquark trials are part of a broader project called ReAnima. Pastor
is on the advisory board for ReAnima. According to the website, the
project is ‘exploring the potential of cutting edge biomedical
technology for human neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation.’
Speaking
to MailOnline last year, Pastor said: ‘The mission of the ReAnima
Project is to focus on clinical research in the state of brain death, or
irreversible coma, in subjects who have recently met the Uniform
Determination of Death Act criteria, but who are still on
cardio-pulmonary or trophic support – a classification in many countries
around the world known as a “living cadaver”.