Chinese Scientists Revive Pig Brain That Had Been Dead for 50 Minutes

In October, the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine featured a story on its cover, which highlights the article “Liver Protects Neuron Viability and Electrocortical Activity in Post-cardiac Arrest Brain Injury” by Guo Zhiyong, Zhao Qiang, He Xiaoshun and their colleagues.

Scientists from the research team have devised a novel approach to cardiac arrest resuscitation, which is anticipated to enhance the cardiopulmonary resuscitation success rate and exert a far-reaching influence on the development of emergency care systems for critical situations.

Patients with cardiac arrest usually suffer from severe brain damage, which is the main reason for deaths in such cases. Animal experiments have indicated that within just a few seconds of cardiac arrest, the brain’s oxygen supply is exhausted, resulting in an instant loss of consciousness.

Previous research indicated that the brain can only endure ischemic damage for five to eight minutes, which has led to the low resuscitation success rates among cardiac arrest patients.

An international research group led by He Xiaoshun from the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong Province, south China, employed an innovative “ex-vivo brain preservation technique” to successfully “reanimate” an isolated pig brain that had been “dead” for 50 minutes.

Specifically, the study took a pig that had already undergone circulatory death as the experimental object. After detaching its brain from its body, the researchers connected the brain to an external life-support system via intubation, thus forming a system that supports brain resuscitation.

The results demonstrated that the pig’s brain was successfully “reanimated”, with brain functions restored and vitality maintained.

This system not only contains components for an artificial heart and artificial lungs but also makes use of normothermic blood perfusion technology to preserve a living pig liver, supplying fresh, oxygen-rich and metabolically stable blood circulation to the isolated pig brain.

The study reveals that with the support of the ex-vivo life-support system, the edema of the isolated brain was significantly reduced, and the vitality and microstructure of nerve cells were remarkably improved, enabling the restoration and maintenance of electrical brain activity.

The study shows that when a functioning liver is added to the brain normothermic machine perfusion circuit, post-cardiac arrest brain injury can be significantly reduced, neuronal viability can be increased, and electrocortical activity can be improved.

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