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.
HOW BIOQUARK PLAN TO TRY REVERSING BRAIN DEATH
1) Harvest stem cells from the patient’s own blood, and inject this back into their body.
2) Inject peptides into the patient’s spinal cord.
3) Fifteen days of laser and median nerve stimulation – while monitoring the patients using MRI scans.
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.
