Canavero's team has taken a new step towards a head transplant
Sergio Canavero and his team published photos of fused neurons in the "halves" of the spinal cord of mice, which brought scientists closer to the realization of the main task – human head transplantation, according to an article published in the journal Neural Regeneration Research: Kim et al., Immunohistochemical evidence of axonal regrowth across polyethylene glycol-fused cervical cords in mice.
(In fact, this is just a letter to the editor, and not a full–fledged peer-reviewed article.)
"The document presented to the public contains scientific evidence of what scientists recognized as impossible a year and a half ago. Today, this is already in the past, and this achievement opens up broad prospects in the treatment of a number of diseases. As before, the research is open, and the opportunity to provide current results is very inspiring," said Valery Spiridonov, an engineer from Vladimir and the first candidate for a head transplant.
At the end of February 2015, Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero announced the launch of the ambitious HEAVEN/AHBR project, in which he planned to transplant a volunteer's head onto a donor body by connecting the spinal cord and brain using a special procedure, which he calls the "GEMINI protocol".
Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov, who was confined to a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy, responded to Canavero's call. The Russian suffers from Werdnig–Hoffman syndrome – a severe genetic disease that gradually deprives a person of the ability to move.
The opinions of neurosurgeons about the head transplant are divided: some do not rule out such a possibility in principle, but are not sure of the success of the operation, others consider this project an adventure that will inevitably end in failure.
Today, Canavero and his colleagues announced that they have managed to take another step towards this operation. They published the first photos showing the fusion of neurons in the spinal cord of rats, cut with a special knife, which scientists demonstrated at the end of last year.
To splice neurons, Canavero's team used a special composition based on polyethylene glycol, which, as preliminary experiments on nerve cell cultures have shown, stimulates wound healing of nervous tissue. The same substance was used in experiments to restore the mobility of mice, which were conducted by Ren Xiaoting, a colleague and like-minded Kanavero.
As part of this experiment, which was conducted in the laboratories of Konkuk University in Seoul (Korea), biologists cut the spinal cord of mice completely – as it will happen during the procedure of human head transplantation. Four weeks later, when the mice began to regain mobility, biologists euthanized the animals and obtained photos of the incision site using a transmission electron microscope.
The scans showed that new nerve endings really began to sprout through the scar in the spinal cord, and this confirmed that the Canavero technique works at least partially.
"The data we have obtained clearly show that a cleanly cut spinal cord can be reconnected by forcing neurons to grow on the border between its halves, which refutes the dogma about the impossibility of such a procedure, which our colleagues have been talking about for decades," Canavero and his colleagues conclude.
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22.02.2017