Bexorg has four of these perfusion machines, dubbed BrainEx, in its New Haven labs across the street from Yale's medical school. The startup had already run tests in 100 brains, with the goal of doing 500 total this year and 1,000 next year.

The scientists insist that the brains are dead. The organs arrive to Bexorg with no electrical activity, and thus no consciousness, and the startup uses a cocktail of drugs to keep them that way. But the individual brain cells are kept alive with a perfusion of artificial blood.

In 2019, Nenad Sestan and Zvonimir Vrselja stunned the world by restoring cellular activity in the brains of decapitated pigs. Now they are applying the same method to dead human brains at their startup Bexorg to reinvent preclinical drug testing.

There's been a bit of revolutionary spirit in Boston, and Donald Ingber, founding director of the @wyssinstitute.bsky.social at Harvard, doesn't mince his words when comparing the Trump Administration's attack on science to King George's blockade of Boston Harbor. wyss.harvard.edu/news/common-...