Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero demonstrated today at a press conference in Glasgow a special surgical knife that allows a head transplant operation and a virtual reality system that will help a person learn to use a new body.
“Professor Farid Amirush (a bioengineer at the University of Illinois at Chicago - ed.) Has created the sharpest and most accurate surgical knife on Earth. It will allow a very clean separation of the spinal cord from the brain with minimal damage to the nerve fibers. The creation of this innovative system is another step towards our main goal of making head transplants possible,”said Canavero.
At the end of February 2015, Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero announced the launch of an ambitious HEAVEN / AHBR project, in which he planned to transplant a volunteer's head onto a donor body by connecting the spinal cord to the brain using a special procedure he calls the GEMINI protocol.
Russian engineer Valery Spiridonov, confined to a wheelchair due to muscle dystrophy, responded to Canavero's call. The Russian suffers from Werdnig-Hoffmann syndrome, a serious genetic disease that gradually deprives a person of the ability to move.
Diamond knife designed for head transplant
In addition to the diamond scalpel, Canavero also presented to the public a special virtual reality system that will help Valery Spiridonov and other patients who agree to such a procedure undergo special psychological training to prepare for life in a new body. Such training will be carried out both before and after the operation. It was developed by the American company Inventum Bioengineering Technologies.
“Simulations like these are extremely important to us, as such systems allow patients to independently learn how to move and how to perform various actions quickly and efficiently. As a programmer, I am sure that such a system is a key part of the HEAVEN project,”Spiridonov himself commented on this event.
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In addition to these new components of the GEMINI protocol, Kanavero announced that his Korean colleagues at Konkuk University in Seoul have confirmed the results of earlier experiments on head transplants in mice, showing that polyethylene glycol actually promotes splicing of nerve fibers and rapid recovery of motor function.
“All of these results indicate that a severed spinal cord can be repaired and that a new version of PEG will play a key role in the first human head transplant. We still need to do a lot of new research and test the technology on the bodies of deceased organ donors, but the current results look very promising and suggest that we are on the right track,”concludes Canavero.