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If you have ever wondered how we are supposed to shut people down in suspended animation for years in order send them into space to colonize Mars or other habitable planets, the answer is: we’re working on it.
More specifically, scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, with a little help from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Biostasis Program, are working on it. Just not for that particular purpose… yet.
Interestingly, it could all just come down to a drug called donepezil which has already been approved by the FDA to treat Alzheimer’s Disease.
Plus, it’s already worked on tadpoles of Xenopus laevis frogs, so sure, humans are the logical next step, right?
“Donepezil has been used worldwide by patients for decades, so its properties and manufacturing methods are well-established. Lipid nanocarriers similar to the ones we used are also now approved for clinical use in other applications,” said the study’s senior author Donald Ingber.
“This study demonstrates that an encapsulated version of the drug could potentially be used in the future to buy patients critical time to survive devastating injuries and diseases, and it could be easily formulated and produced at scale on a much shorter time scale than a new drug.”
So far, the only way to achieve a form of biostasis involves aggressively cooling a patient’s body. This drug could change all of that.
“Cooling a patient’s body down to slow its metabolic processes has long been used in medical settings to reduce injuries and long-term problems from severe conditions, but it can only currently be done in a well-resourced hospital,” said study co-author Michael Super, director of immuno-materials at the Wyss Institute. “Achieving a similar state of ‘biostasis’ with an easily administered drug like DNP could potentially save millions of lives every year.”
In 2019, New Scientist reported that doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Centre were able to successfully place humans in suspended animation for the first time.
They did this using something called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), which involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline.
The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre.
A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted.
They wouldn’t reveal how many people had survived as a result of using this procedure, but it was only tested on people had an acute trauma and have had a cardiac arrest with a less than 5% chance that they would normally survive.
DARPA, unsurprisingly, is a little more focused on this latest development involving the drug donepezil being used for military application.
“Biostasis program aims to extend the time for lifesaving medical treatment, often referred to as ‘the Golden Hour,’ following traumatic injury or acute infection, thus increasing survivability for military personnel operating in far-forward conditions with limited access to medical professionals or trauma centers,” the DARPA website states. “To do so, Biostasis is developing novel chemical biology approaches that reversibly and controllably slow biological systems without cold-chain to stabilize and protect their functional capacity until medical intervention is possible.”