- Researchers in Texas crafted a device meant to help isolate the brain for scientific study.
- By keeping the brain alive and functioning separate from the body for hours, experts believe that they can improve heart-lung bypass technology.
- This sci-fi-like concept was first modeled in pigs, but humans could be next.
When a pig recently went under anesthesia at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, it was for anything but a routine procedure. Researchers were able to isolate blood flow to the brain, separate that brain from the rest of the body, and use a new device to keep the brain alive and functioning.
The pig brains were all on their own for five hours. And they did just fine, thanks to the new extracorporeal pulsatile circulatory control (EPCC) device.
“This novel method enables research that focuses on the brain independent of the body, allowing us to answer physiological questions in a way that has never been done,” Juan Pascual, professor at UT Southwestern, said in a statement.
This headline is sensationalized. Only the blood flow to the brain was isolated from the rest of the body, and the brain was not removed during the procedure (it was removed post-mortem to study how the procedure affected the brain).
The main purpose of the study was to separate blood flow to the brain from the rest of the body to make it easier to test the effect of drugs on the brain, without having the rest of the body’s response to the drugs interfere with the results.
Since the process is similar to the heart lung bypass which is already used on humans during heart surgery, this research may eventually lead to better heart lung bypass methods. The current methods can cause problems in the brain for a few reasons including differing blood flow, air and particles getting into the blood, and the body’s inflammation response.
Source: PhD in this area.