Study aims to ‘reanimate’ brain-dead

Bioquark believes mix of stem cells, drugs and other stimuli could awaken mind

Ever since Ira Pastor declared his company’s intentions to take 20 braindead patients and try to “regenerate” their nervous systems, his email box has been overflowing with inquiries from far-flung parts of the world. Skeptical scientists grilling him about the details of the techniques his team is using. Desperate families, who have been paying for years to keep loved ones on life support, wondering how to enroll. Outraged representatives from every major religion telling him why what he’s doing violates the laws of nature.

But Pastor explains that any changes due to the treatments will probably be subtle, at the cellular level at first, and detectable only by sophisticated blood and spinal fluid testing and MRI imaging. Such work, he says, may have more applications for treating traumatic brain injury, mental illnesses, spinal cord issues and Alzheimer’s in the short term rather than disorders of consciousness.

At any given time, hundreds of thousands of people in the world are estimated to be trapped in the little-understood place between consciousness and nothingness.

Some of them are in a vegetative state that occurs when the part of the brain that controls thought no longer functions but they sleep, breathing as normal. Others are in a coma where they cannot be awakened and don’t respond to light, sound or touch. Those most severely impacted are considered to be brain-dead.

Research on brain-dead patients who are still on life support is rare. The MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston published results of a ground-breaking study on brain-dead and nearly braindead patients in 2002. At the time, some scientists predicted that the findings would pave the way for an explosion in such research, but it raised so many ethical questions that few other institutions dared to venture into type of work.

Now, nearly 15 years later, Bioquark and its India-based partner Revita Life Science hope to build on those findings. Recruitment of study subjects started this month in northern India, a location the company chose partly because it’s cheaper but also because the laws surrounding studies of what some call living cadavers are in a gray area.

Without the backing of any university, major hospital or pharmaceutical company, Bioquark expects to use nearly half the $2 million in capital it has raised from family and friends and some angel investors.

During the six-week trials, patients will be given a continuous infusion into an area around the spinal cord of a biochemical cocktail the company developed through its research on previous regenerative medicine. Stem cells will also be administered every two weeks.

Pastor said that the researchers spent a lot of time figuring out how to communicate their work and expectations to the families in a way that is sensitive to the fact that they may still be grieving. Part of the protocol of the experiment makes it clear that families can opt to drop out at any time if they change their minds.

“We want them to understand this is highly experimental,” Pastor said. “Although it represents a possibility, we don’t want to generate false hope.”