Disembodied Human Brains Being Kept Alive for Drug Tests – But Are They Conscious?

In this Modernity article, Steve Watson reports on a Connecticut startup using revived human brain tissue from recently deceased donors to test experimental drugs, raising obvious medical hopes and deeply unsettling ethical questions.

• Bexorg, a Connecticut-based startup, is reportedly maintaining intact human brains outside the body for extended periods after sourcing them from recently deceased donors.
• The company’s BrainEx system pumps synthetic blood through the brain’s vascular network, delivering oxygen, nutrients, and controlled conditions to keep the tissue metabolically active.
• The goal is to create a more realistic testing platform for drugs aimed at neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
• Supporters argue that intact human brains from older donors offer far more useful data than animal testing or simplified lab-grown organoids.
• The article says Biohaven has already used Bexorg data to advance a drug targeting energy deficits in diseased brains.
• One Parkinson’s treatment that failed in mice reportedly showed promise at much lower doses when tested on the revived human brain tissue.
• Bexorg says the brains do not have the coordinated neural activity necessary for consciousness and uses propofol to suppress electrical signaling.
• The article frames the research as part of a larger trend in which human neural tissue is being kept alive, trained, or interfaced with machines in ways that challenge old assumptions about life, death, and awareness.
• Watson also points to lab-grown human brain-cell clusters trained to play video games as another example of science rushing into territory where the ethical guardrails may not be keeping pace.

Read the full story: https://modernity.news/2026/05/25/disembodied-human-brains-being-kept-alive-for-drug-tests-but-are-they-conscious/