Disembodied human brains kept 'alive' for drug testing by controversial American startup



Several years ago, a team of researchers obtained numerous pig brains from a slaughterhouse and revived them off-site for experimentation purposes. That team has since moved up the food chain. Now it obtains human donors' brains, restores their functions, and uses them to test experimental drugs.

Bexorg, a Connecticut-based biotech startup spun out of Yale University, boasts about having created a "platform that leverages the untouched potential of nature's most complex and enduring mystery: the human brain."

'It’s a remarkable brain bank.'

Whereas other researchers might be limited to experimenting on lab-grown, human pseudo-brains or cell cultures, the team at Bexorg meddles with "full mature, intact, and isolated brains for days on end" with the stated aim of advancing brain disease therapies.

Unlike the company's slick pitch, the reality appears to be something of a horror show. After all, the over 700 brains that have been subjected to experimentation at Bexorg so far were apparently far from inert.

Bexorg takes human brains from their newly deceased donors' bodies, places them in what are effectively vats, and feeds them liters of blood substitute and other fluids that provide oxygen from an artificial lung and carry away waste to a fake kidney. The tubes that carry the sustaining fluids are connected to blood vessels in the brain via four plastic ports.

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According to the peer-reviewed academic journal Science, the company's proprietary life-support system BrainEx keeps the disembodied brains alive and preserves their key functions so that they can metabolize experimental drugs and react to other stimuli.

After roughly 24 hours in a state of drugged limbo, donors' brains are cut up into hundreds of pieces for further study.

Although the brains are alive and reactive for the benefit of "drug discovery," Bexorg CEO Zvonimir Vrselja has stated that "higher-level brain functions are not restored."

According to a 2019 study in which Vrselja and other members of what became the Bexorg team used their technology to revive pig brains obtained from a food processing facility, "The observed restoration of molecular and cellular processes following 4h of global anoxia/ischemia should not be extrapolated to signify resurgence of normal brain function. Indeed, quite the opposite: at no point did we observe the kind of organized global electrical activity associated with awareness, perception, or other higher-order brain functions."

To ensure against the re-emergence of consciousness among the subjects of their "wet-lab" experiments, researchers suppress the human brains' electrical activity with anesthetics, specifically the drug propofol.

Propofol apparently causes brain activity to become unstable until the brain loses consciousness.

"The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness," Brenand Parent, a bioethicist from New York University Langone Health who sits on Bexorg's board, told Science.

Despite the company's reassurances and use of multiple measures to block neuronal activity, some have raised serious ethical concerns about Bexorg's technology, which initially developed with the help of funding through the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative. A source familiar told Blaze News that the company is not presently receiving NIH funding.

"This is brand-new, and there's no kind of institutional oversight," Yale bioethicist Stephen Latham told ScienceAlert in 2019 regarding the earlier experiments on pig brains.

"This is not animal research, because the brain comes to the researchers from an already dead animal," continued Latham. "But if consciousness were somehow induced in the brain, we don't have ethics committees … that are constituted to even think about how to do the kinds of trade-offs you do when you do research on human subjects or on animals."

Vrselja claimed in a December 2025 study published in the Alzheimer's Association's journal, Alzheimer's and Dementia, that the 5-year-old startup's "perfusion‐based postmortem brain model can recapitulate the complexity of the brain at the cellular and systems level."

The December study claimed further that "utilizing human disease brains as a preclinical model promises to substantially increase the probability of success in developing new therapies for AD."

Bexorg did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Bruna Bellaver, a research assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, told Science that BrainEx is "a huge step up from mouse models."

Bruce Car, the chief science officer at Biohaven, one of Bexorg's collaborators, has used roughly 130 of the Bexorg-sustained brains to test drugs. Car told Science that one of the drugs, the intended use of which is to prevent toxic proteins from building up in the brain, didn't perform as desired in a mouse, but worked in the disembodied human brains at a lower-than-expected dose. This apparently saved Biohaven a year of development.

"It’s a remarkable brain bank," said MIT neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, who instead uses pseudo-brains grown from human stem cells.

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Scientists deal another blow to gender ideology, confirming the obvious: Men's and women's brains work differently



Radical feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and various exponents of trangenderism have suggested that sex — or at the very least gender, assuming there is a difference — is socially constructed.

A group of Stanford Medicine researchers rained on the gender ideologues' parade this week with a new study indicating that no amount of social construction or cosmetic surgery can hide the fact of one's actual sex on a brain scan.

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, identified "highly replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network."

Simply put: men's and women's brains not only are physically distinct, but they operate differently.

Differences between the sexes in behavior, performance, and physiology have been observed and understood since time immemorial. While various studies have substantiated this common sense in esteemed academic journals — highlighting in 2017, for instance, the volumetric and structural differences between male and female brains — the Stanford scientists suggested that previous scientific work demonstrating differences in brain organization between the sexes remained inconclusive.

Accordingly, they set out to "uncover latent functional brain dynamics that distinguish male and female brains."

Lead authors Srikanth Ryali and Yuan Zhang, along with senior author Vinod Menon, director of the Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, fed a new artificial intelligence model various brain scans, telling it whether it was digesting images of male or female brains. Over time it began to "notice" subtle patterns that could help it differentiate between the two types.

The researchers then tested their spatiotemporal deep neural network model on the brain scans of 1,500 young adults, ages 20 to 35. The AI model proved incredibly effective at determining whether the scans came from men or women, getting it right over 90% of the time.

"Our results demonstrate that sex differences in functional brain dynamics are not only highly replicable and generalizable but also behaviorally relevant, challenging the notion of a continuum in male-female brain organization," said the study.

"This is a very strong piece of evidence that sex is a robust determinant of human brain organization," Menon said in a release.

The researchers also created sex-specific models of cognitive abilities. According to Stanford Medicine, one AI model was able to predict cognitive performance in men but not in women. The other model was effective in predicting cognitive performance but with the sexes reversed.

"These models worked really well because we successfully separated brain patterns between sexes," Menon noted. "That tells me that overlooking sex differences in brain organization could lead us to miss key factors underlying neuropsychiatric disorders."

The "hot spots" that were most helpful in distinguishing between male and female brains were the so-called default mode network, the corpus striatum, and the limbic system.

The Telegraph noted that the "default mode network" is the area of the brain believed to be the neurological seat for the "self," critical for contemplative thought, daydreaming, and processing autobiographic memories.

The striatum is a cluster of neurons in the forebrain that plays a general role in skill learning, apparently optimizing behavior by "refining action selection and in shaping habits and skills as a modulator of motor repertoires."

The limbic system is a group of structures deep inside the brain that performs various functions — from governing emotions, motivation, smell, and behavior to playing a role in the formation of long-term memory and dealing with sexual stimulation. It's also reportedly important in habit forming and rewards.

"A key motivation for this study is that sex plays a crucial role in human brain development, in aging, and in the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders," continued Menon. "Identifying consistent and replicable sex differences in the healthy adult brain is a critical step toward a deeper understanding of sex-specific vulnerabilities in psychiatric and neurological disorders."

Gina Rippon, a leftist professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Center, scrambled to account for the study's conclusions, claiming that society is to blame for the physical neurological differences between men and women, reported the Telegraph.

"The really intriguing issue is that those areas of the brain which are most reliably distinguishing the sexes are key parts of the social brain," said Rippon. "The key issue is whether these differences are a product of sex-specific, biological influences or of brain-changing gendered experiences. Or both. Are we really looking at sex differences? Or gender differences?"

Rippon has spent many years downplaying the role of biology in creating sex differences in the brain, going so far as to pen a controversial book in 2019 called "Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain."

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Scientists seek to create 'biocomputers' using lab-grown, human pseudo brains



A group of Maryland scientists revealed their intention in a paper published Monday to lean into the use of human pseudo brains instead of silicon chips for sophisticated computing.

Noting that the human brain continues to best machines in various ways, such as in image processing and in terms of energy efficiency, the paper suggests that simplified and miniaturized human pseudo brains — called "brain organoids" — could be used to great effect in biocomputing.

The hoped-for result would be an efficient system that can tackle problems conventional digital computers are or will soon be unable to solve, particularly if the silicon-based competitors max out their processing capacity limits and energy demands.

There are already ethical concerns about the use of these so-called organoids, particularly if the systems in which they will be used enjoy significant processing upgrades; however, the scientists indicated they will accept ongoing feedback as their monstrosities grow in capability and possible cognition.

The why

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the University of California, San Diego, and other academic institutions penned a study entitled "Organoid intelligence (OI): the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish," published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Science.

The paper notes that "Human brains are slower than machines at processing simple information, such as arithmetic, but they far surpass machines in processing complex information as brains deal better with few and/or uncertain data. ... Moreover, each brain has a storage capacity estimated at 2,500 TB, based on its 86–100 billion neurons having more than 10^15 connections."

The researchers suggested biological learning not only uses fewer observations to learn how to solve problems (requiring ~10 training samples to distinguish between two objects versus the many millions required by AI algorithms), but uses far less power to solve computation problems.

Seeking to take advantage of these benefits and others, the researchers have placed stock in the future of "biological, brain-directed computing as an alternative to silicon-based computing, with the potential for unprecedented advances in computing speed, processing power, data efficiency, and storage capabilities – all with lower energy needs."

Instead of computer chips, dependent on rare earth minerals and hostile supply, biocomputers of the kind described in the paper depend upon the "self-assembled machinery of 3D human brain cell cultures (brain organoids) to memorize and compute inputs."

The advancement of this technology could "stimulate drug development and other interventions" as well as "aid the development of new brain-computer-interface technology," said the paper.

The how

The pseudo brains are generated from embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells derived from skin samples.

The paper notes that the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing "has produced such brain organoids with high levels of standardization and scalability. ... Having a diameter below 500 μm, and comprising fewer than 100,000 cells, each organoid is roughly one 3-millionth the size of the human brain (theoretically equating to 800 MB of memory storage)."

A paper published in October in the journal Neuron detailed how a team of researchers grew a collection of 800,000 human brain cells to generate a pseudo brain.

BBC News reported that Dr. Brett Kagan's team at Cortical Labs connected the monstrosity to a video game via electrodes revealing which side the ball was on and its distance from the paddle. The brain reportedly learned how to play the game in five minutes with a success rate well above random chance.

Watch brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time [1/2] youtu.be

To successfully "implement the vision of a multidisciplinary field of OI," the scientists reckon they will have to scale up current pseudo brains into "complex, durable 3D structures enriched with cells and genes associated with learning, and connecting these to next-generation input and output devices and AI/machine learning systems."

"For organoid intelligence, brain organoids will need to become even more brain-like" than the Pong-playing pseudo brains at Cortical Labs.

To get to where researchers want to be for organoid intelligence in the way of supporting sophisticated computations, they need to increase the size of the pseudo brains from tens of thousands of cells to tens of millions of cells.

In order to feed these pseudo brains, the scientists endeavor to create artificial blood vessels using microfluidic systems. In addition to nourishing the organoids, these fluid systems will enable OI techs to communicate with them via chemical signals.

The glaring ethical issues

The researchers recognized that creating a human pseudo brain "that can learn, remember, and interact with their environment raises complex ethical questions. Could they develop consciousness, even in a rudimentary form? Could they experience pain or suffering? And what rights would people have with respect to brain organoids made from their cells?"

Admittedly, the researchers do not have the answers to these questions, noting they "will require deeper analysis and research regarding the morally salient neurobiological features that contribute to human capacities, including consciousness, and the implications for OI research and implementation when some or all of these are met."

Even if there are some signs of sentience or rudimentary consciousness, the researchers intimated that they may ultimately have to appeal to a scientific "consensus" on whether the pseudo-brains' newfound capacities warrant concern.

Having recognized the ethically shaky ground on which their "new frontier" rests, the researchers proposed using "an 'embedded ethics' approach whereby an ethics team will identify, discuss, and analyze ethical issues as they arise in the course of this work. Embedded ethics is a standard approach in interdisciplinary ethics research, whereby expert ethicists join and collaborate integrally with research and development teams to consider and address ethical issues via an iterative and continuous process as the research evolves."

Organoid intelligence: a new biocomputing frontier youtu.be

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