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Remember those undead pig brains from the Before Times? In 2019, a team of Yale School of Medicine researchers gave us all nightmare fodder when they restored some electrical function and cellular activity to pig brains that were decapitated and had been sitting at room temperature for four hours.
Now, the same group of researchers has applied its experimental treatment to the whole hog. By modifying their treatment for the entire body, not just the brain, the researchers were able to partially revive the organ systems of pigs after they had been dead for an hour. The team hopes its treatment, called OrganEx and detailed in a new study published Wednesday in Nature, will reshape scientific thought around death and expand the conditions under which life-saving transplants can be performed.
“The technology has a great deal of promise for our ability to preserve organs after they’re removed from a donor,” study co-author Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale, told reporters earlier this week. By hooking up a deceased person’s organ to this treatment prior to transplant, doctors could one day “be able to transport it a long distance over a long period of time to get it to a recipient who needs it.”