Sopuruchi Onwuka, with agency reports

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have made a successful use of the innovative extracorporeal pulsatile circulatory control (EPCC) device to isolate a mammal’s head from its body for as long as five hours without injury to the brain.

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The head raising feat now puts possibility in view for safe isolation of the brain from blood flow for extended period of time during which critical inter-organ bypasses could be safely conducted in animals, including humans.

According to a publication in Scientific Reports reviewed by The Oracle Today the researchers successfully isolated the brain of a pig for scientific study and kept it alive and functioning separate from the body for hours.

Experts believe that they can improve heart-lung bypass technology in human by using the concept.

According to the report, researchers were able to isolate blood flow to the brain, separate that brain from the rest of the body, and use the new EPCC device to keep the brain alive and functioning.

The pig brains, according to the report, were all on their own for five hours and did just fine.

Professor at UT Southwestern, Juan Pascual, said in a statement that, “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.”

The UTSW team which published the findings in the journal stated that the new way to study the brain not only allows research without influence from other bodily functions, but could also help researchers design improved machines for human cardiopulmonary bypass that better replicate natural blood flow to the brain.

The publication by Scientific reports continues from here.

Making sure this newfangled way of isolating the brain would work, though, wasn’t simple. To test it all out, the researchers first had to redirect the pig brain’s blood supply. The team physically detached—the official word is “redirected”—the key arteries running from the body to the brain, and connected the brain to the EPCC to ensure blood flow remained fluid.

“Our primary objective was to preserve brain function under EPCC to achieve circulatory isolation from the majority of the rest of the body in fully controllable fashion,” the authors wrote in the study.

What sets the new EPCC device apart from cardiopulmonary bypass devices already in use is its ability to use a pulsative flow akin to a human heart to keep blood flowing to the brain. The team says that this may help prevent brain-related side effects sometimes caused by the traditional bypass machines. The pump features algorithms that allow the team to maintain and adjust variables, including blood pressure, volume, temperature, oxygenation, and nutrients. They report—thanks to electrocorticography and brain-depth electrodes evaluating the brain activity—that there were “minimal to no changes” in brain activity over the five-hour procedure.

Once the organ was isolated, the team then researched sugar’s effect on the brain without any concerns about influence from the rest of the body’s organs muddying the findings. This is the first time, according to Pascual, that researchers have ever been able to fully study the brain’s function without worrying about the impact of the rest of the body.

“Our approach,” the authors wrote, “enables the study of neural activity and its circulatory manipulation in independence of most of the rest of the organism.”