I see no pushback about the actual science of it in the comments, which seems surprising. It’s great that there is a new brain preservation company around, but I think the results are somewhat over-claimed. I’m not an expert in biochemistry, but if I understand correctly, your (new) preprint is basically: take n=5 pigs, try to have their brains preserved, which fails in the first two of them because of incorrectly placed cannula, then succeeds in the next three, in particular the last one with t=14 mins gap. Then look at the damage on a few sites under microscope and judge them to be OK. For reference, the abstract says that you develop “connectomically traceable whole brains [...] and establish that 14 min is the approximate length of the perfusability window”. The new preprint is not peer-reviewed, and the old paper is from more than 10 years ago. (I see that it’s actually has 61 citations in google scholar, it would be useful to know what was the progress / assessment from the scientific community since then.)
Tiny sample size, imperfect experimental setup, no published actual quantitative data, as well as obvious conflict of interest on top of this makes it hard for me to fully believe in the results. FWIW I asked one biochem PhD friend of mine for opinion, and then also ChatGPT, both seem to strongly agree that this is a cool proof of concept, but significantly over-claimed as far as scientific evidence goes.
I see no pushback about the actual science of it in the comments, which seems surprising. It’s great that there is a new brain preservation company around, but I think the results are somewhat over-claimed. I’m not an expert in biochemistry, but if I understand correctly, your (new) preprint is basically: take n=5 pigs, try to have their brains preserved, which fails in the first two of them because of incorrectly placed cannula, then succeeds in the next three, in particular the last one with t=14 mins gap. Then look at the damage on a few sites under microscope and judge them to be OK. For reference, the abstract says that you develop “connectomically traceable whole brains [...] and establish that 14 min is the approximate length of the perfusability window”. The new preprint is not peer-reviewed, and the old paper is from more than 10 years ago. (I see that it’s actually has 61 citations in google scholar, it would be useful to know what was the progress / assessment from the scientific community since then.)
Tiny sample size, imperfect experimental setup, no published actual quantitative data, as well as obvious conflict of interest on top of this makes it hard for me to fully believe in the results. FWIW I asked one biochem PhD friend of mine for opinion, and then also ChatGPT, both seem to strongly agree that this is a cool proof of concept, but significantly over-claimed as far as scientific evidence goes.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on our new post! We get more in-depth about outside review of the science there.