This Week In Science: what if we could experiment on live human brains?
We can’t, obviously: the ethical concerns place this firmly in dystopian science fiction territory. Yet, the Yale spinout startup Bexorg is offering something very close. The team created a proprietary system which takes brains removed from deceased people who choose to donate their bodies to science and connect them to machines which pump oxygenated fluid through and remove waste from the organs. The brains have minimal coordinated neural firing and are kept under anaesthetic to further reduce electrical activity. The company’s ethics board says this combination of anaesthetic and low coordination means the brains are not conscious.
The purported benefits of this technology are impressive. Drugs targeting neurodegenerative diseases are difficult to test because what works in a mouse does not always work in people, but the use of aged human brains allows the trials to account for the natural aging-related degeneration of the cells. Biomarkers are collected from the brains, and after 24 hours the brains are removed and sliced, letting scientists collect cell-specific results.
Bexorg’s CEO and cofounder Zvonimir Vrselja claims this will allow drug developers to avoid the so-called “valley of death,” where drugs fail to translate from animal to human trials. The startup was founded in 2021 with the goal of revolutionising drug trial using a combination of their brain-perfusion technology and an AI-based model of the brain, and so far, the disembodied brains have already been used for clinical trials.
