A biotech startup called Bexorg is doing something that sounds like it was ripped straight from the pages of a cyberpunk novel — or from the script of “RoboCop,” for that matter.
The company is extracting human brains just hours after their owners died and then hooking them up to specialized life support machines, Science reports. While the masses of pink mush no longer host electrical activity, most of their key functions remain intact, allowing scientists to test experimental drugs, such as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, like never before.
You’d hope that the disembodied cerebrums are most assuredly dead. But according to the reporting, an extracted brain hooked up to one of Bexorg’s proprietary life support machines, BrainEX, “hovers between life and death.” There’s no spark of consciousness, and yet the brains are kept running on an artificial lung, kidney oxygenate, blood, and other fluids.
Perhaps you can put this ambiguity down to the startup being deliberately enigmatic to provoke attention. Or maybe it’s a reflection of how the distinction between life and death is uncomfortably blurry.
But you can put those doubts out of your very-much embodied mind, assures Brendan Parent, one of Bexorg’s six ethicists. The extracted brains are almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary for minimal consciousness, he told Science. To prevent the eerie implausibility that some the brains produce electrical activity, the brains are also dosed with anesthetic propofol. Of course, that such a measure has to be taken in the first place may actually be less assuring and more unsettling.
Ethics aside — not a statement that should be made lightly — the scientific possibilities that these extracted brains afford may well hold promise. Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja said that the brains come with decades of environmental exposures, histories of drug treatments, and other factors that make them a more realistic testing medium for drugs. “You get cells that have been there for 60 to 80 years,” Vrselja told Science.
Bruna Bellaver, who studies neurodegeneration at the University of Pittsburgh, was also effusive.
“It’s a huge step up from mouse models,” she told Science.
Bexorg is the same startup that demonstrated, over six years ago, that it could keep decapitated pig brains alive for 36 hours using a prototype of its BrainEX machine.
Today, its human brains aren’t kept running in perpetuity. After 24 hours, they’re sliced into hundreds of pieces so they can be analyzed by scientists. The company plans to use a robotic arm to slice up to 1,600 brains per year.
Though Bexorg hasn’t itself published any papers on its work with human brains, other companies have already been eagerly experimenting with them. The pharmaceutical firm Biohaven has used 130 of its brains to test drugs, according to Science, including a potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease, and plans to launch a clinical trial for another drug using data it gathered from those experiments.
More on neuroscience: Scientists Say Test Subjects Were Able to Quit Smoking After They Blasted Their Brains With a Huge Magnet
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