An experiment 'resurrects' the organs of dead pigs with artificial blood

In 2019, neuroscientists and doctors from Yale University (United States) managed to recover part of the functions of the brain of a pig that had been slaughtered four hours earlier in a slaughterhouse.

Now, that same group has repeated the achievement, but in all the vital organs of several pigs that had been dead for an hour.

The research, recently published in

, has been based on a complex injection system of a kind of synthetic

that reversed cell death.

This breakthrough opens a new path for organ transplantation, but raises new questions about timing of death.

After the last heartbeat, a chain of events is unleashed: the lack of blood supply (ischemia) implies the absence of oxygen and other essential elements that lead to the death of cells, tissues, organs and the entire organism.

In this investigation, scientists caused cardiac arrest in dozens of pigs (they had previously been anesthetized).

After an hour without blood supply, that is, dead, they were divided into several study groups: some were connected to a life support system used in severe cases in which the heart and lungs stop working (ECMO, for its acronym for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation).

Others were left as a control group, without applying any resuscitation technique.

A third group was connected to a perfusion system (slow and continuous introduction of liquids) designed by them called OrganEx.

After six hours they studied the state of cells, tissues and the functioning of their vital organs.

“Not all cells die immediately, there are a series of events that take their time.

It is a process in which you can intervene, stop and restore some cellular function”

David Andrijevic, a neuroscientist at Yale University School of Medicine

David Andrijevic, a neuroscientist at the Yale University School of Medicine and co-author of the experiments, recalls that "not all cells die immediately, there are a series of events that take their time."

What they have done has been to take advantage of that period.

"It's a process in which you can intervene, stop and restore some cellular function," adds Andrijevic.

“OrganEx is made up of two components,” Andrijevic said in a virtual meeting with journalists.

“The first is a perfusion system similar to cardiac and respiratory support systems that connect to the circulatory system.

The second part is a synthetic cellular fluid that is pumped out and contains different elements optimized to promote cell health, reduce cell death, and reduce inflammation throughout the body,” he details.

The base of this fluid is a modified hemoglobin, the protein that transports oxygen.

After having about twenty pigs connected to OrganEx for six hours, they analyzed various parameters at the cellular level in the brain, lungs, heart, liver and kidneys.

On virtually every metric, OrganEx outperformed ECMO.

The scientists found that certain key cellular functions were active in many areas of the pigs' bodies, and even that some organ functions had been restored.

Thus, they observed that neurons and astrocytes in two brain regions recovered their pre-ischemia state.

They also detected electrical activity in the heart, which retained the ability to contract.

Furthermore, they saw that the different organs reuptake the glucose present in this artificial blood.

Finally, they also found that, at the genetic level,

the cellular machinery restarted its repair mechanisms.

But, and this they wanted to emphasize both in the published study and in the conference, they did not detect a recovery of general brain activity.

That is, they had not resurrected the pigs, but they had resurrected their organs.

“Basically, our findings highlight a previously overlooked ability of the large mammalian body to recover after cessation of blood flow.

And this could be used to increase the availability of organs for transplants or treat localized organ failure”, Andrijevic concludes.

“The technology holds great promise for our ability to preserve organs after harvesting them from a donor”

Stephen Latham is director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics.

His colleague Stephen Latham is director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and co-author of the study.

For him, this work has and will have many applications.

The closest in time are in the field of organ transplants.

“I think the technology holds great promise for our ability to preserve organs after harvesting them from a donor.

You could take the organ and hook it up to this perfusion system so you can transport it over a long distance for a long period of time to a recipient in need.”

Faced with the conservation at very low temperatures of current systems, which entail a risk when recovering them, these experiments kept the organs at temperatures of 36º to 37º.

On the possibility of connecting a human after cerebral, myocardial or renal ischemia, Latham cuts speculation short: “This is very far from its use in humans.

The goal here was to see if using perfusate [the fluid they created] could restore metabolic and cellular function in a wide range of organs.

And we have discovered that it can.

But it doesn't restore all functions in all organs,” he recalls.

Future application in living humans would require, he adds, "much more detail to be studied about the extent to which ischemic damage is undone in different types of organs before one even comes close to thinking of trying an experiment like this in a human." human who has suffered anoxic damage”.

The neuroscientist at the University of California in Los Angeles (United States) Martin Monti, not related to the study, highlights what he considers most relevant from his results: "Biological death is more like a cascade of dominoes, with one event that triggers the next, which to an instant transition.

What is innovative about this technology is that this cascade can be stopped in some organs just by restoring the correct cellular environment and metabolic parameters.”

According to Monti, the potential implications, if this is ever successfully translated to humans, are huge: "How many more lives could be saved by transplantation each year thanks to increased organ viability?"

“This study shows that our social convention about death, that is, as an absolute end in black and white, is not scientifically valid”

Sam Parnia, director of resuscitation and critical care research at New York University

The director of research in resuscitation and critical care at New York University Sam Parnia insists on the idea pointed out by Monti: "This study shows that our social convention about death, that is, as an absolute end in black and white, does not it is scientifically valid.

Rather, scientifically, death is a biological process that remains treatable and reversible for hours after it has occurred,” he explained to the Science Media Center (SMC).

The experiments with these dozens of 35-kilogram pigs and a few months old also provoke another deep reflection if OrganEx or a similar system is ever used in humans.

Anders Sandberg, a researcher at the Institute for the Future of Humanity at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom), puts it: “Ethically, this [the experiments] seems to be good news without collateral problems.

In the future, however, such methods could also make a treatment given right after a very serious stroke or trauma more effective: by saving patients who would otherwise have died, it could reduce the number of transplants available.

This may still be good news,

but there is a risk that it essentially prevents people from dying rather than making them recover.”

For Sandberg, in statements to the SMC, there is an increasingly challenging ethical problem to determine "when radical life support is simply useless and, as technology advances, we will be able to find more ways to keep bodies alive despite not being able to revive the person we really care about.”

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