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Scientists have figured out how to revive the brains of a pig almost an hour after it had died and circulation had ceased and then were able to sustain its activity for hours.
The discovery was made by a team led by Xiaoshun He from Sun Yat-Sen University in China, who recently shared their findings in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine.
In their research paper, the scientists explained that they were able to revive the pig’s brain by incorporating its unharmed liver into the life support system.
By keeping the liver functioning, because of its role in purifying the body’s blood and keeping blood flow going, they were able to reduce the damage done to the brain in the case of sudden cardiac arrest.
As Michelle Starr of Science Alert explains, “Sudden cardiac arrest [CA] causes a lot of problems in the body due to the rapid cessation of blood flow. The subsequent drop in circulation to parts of the body is called ischemia, and when it occurs in the brain, it can cause serious, irreparable damage within minutes.”
Using 17 lab-raised Tibetan minipigs, the team compared the inclusion of a liver in a loss of circulation. In one set of experiments, two groups of pigs were subjected to brain ischemia for 30 minutes; one of the groups was also subjected to liver ischemia, and the other was not. Meanwhile a control group underwent no ischemia.
When the pigs were euthanized and their brains examined, the control group obviously had the least brain damage; but the group that had not been subjected to liver ischemia showed significantly less brain damage than the group that had.
Not only that, with the group that had not been subjected to liver ischemia, the researchers were able to restore brain activity up to 50 minutes after blood flow to the brain had stopped.
The pig brains that were still connected to the liver system also showed electrical activity for up to six hours after they had been revived.
“…the results from the current study showed the crucial role of the liver in the pathogenesis of post-CA brain injury. These findings shed light on a novel cardio-pulmonary-hepatic-cerebral resuscitation strategy,” the researchers wrote in their report.
It was just two years ago that scientists first managed to revive the organs of pigs, like the heart, brain, liver and kidneys, an hour after the animals actually died.
Earlier this year, taking that research even further, scientists were able to keep a pig’s brain alive and functioning for hours after removing it from the animal’s body by using “a pump that maintained or adjusted a range of variables, including blood pressure, volume, temperature, oxygenation, and nutrients.”
So far, none of this research has become applicable to humans, so it is still a ways off before one of these scientists are able to become a real-life Dr. Frankenstein.
As Stephen Latham, a Yale ethicist who was part of the team that first revived pigs’ organs an hour after their death stated, “There’s a great deal more experimentation that would be required [before it could be adapted to human beings.] … And you’d have to think about what is the state to which a human being would be restored. If you gave them a perfusate [an artificial blood substitute used in the procedure] that reversed some but not all of that damage, that could be a terrible thing.”