An American biotech company wants to revive dead people’s brains – and a medical watchdog has just given them permission.
With this permission, Philadelphia-based Bioquark Inc. is now immediately seeking dead participants for their clinical trial, which will commence at Anupam Hospital in India. Valid patients must be certified dead, kept alive only by life support. Called the Reanima Project, the trial may be the first official one of its kind.
The three-storey hospital is run by Dr. Himanshu Bansal, an orthopaedician with a keen interest in neuroscience. He admits to not having practised medicine since 2005. “I have always preferred research over practising medicine,” said Dr. Bansal, a slightly overweight, affable, eager-to-please man in his early forties, who wears confidence as a second skin.
He is the principal investigator of the ‘groundbreaking’ project after it became known that this cutting-edge clinical trial project had been given ethical approvals to recruit 20 clinically dead patients by government authorities. The project is a joint-venture between the Philadelphia-based biotech company Bioquark Inc, Revita Life Science (of which Dr. Bansal is the owner) and Anupam Hospital in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand — a town so inconsequential that it is best known for bad roads and proximity to Nainital.
The project will begin with “First in Human Neuro-Regeneration and Neuro-Reanimation,” a proof of concept trial to test the project’s methods before diving into more complex efforts. During the six-week stage, doctors will inject peptides into patients’ spinal cords every day, and inject stem cells twice a week.
Using brain imaging, Pastor and his team will monitor participants’ brains for signs of regeneration. They’ll pay particularly close attention to the upper spinal cord and brainstem, the region that controls independent breathing and heartbeat. When brainstem function is permanently lost, a person is certified dead. A positive initial result would include “a functional epimorphic event at the intersection of the upper spinal cord…and the lowest region of the brainstem,” Pastor said. The expectations of having a case to activate the process will commence shortly Dr. Bansal added.
