ARPA-H awards Bexorg up to $28 million to extend human brain viability after death from one day to two weeks
ARPA-H awards Bexorg up to $28 million to extend human brain viability after death from one day to two weeks
On September 4, 2026, ARPA-H, the US agency funding high-risk biomedical research, awarded New Haven-based Bexorg up to $28 million for its ExOBrain project. The funding will advance BrainEx, a platform that pumps artificial blood through donated human brains after death, from a prototype that works for one day to a production system intended to keep tissue active for up to 14 days. The project is led by Zvonimir Vrselja, one of the technology’s original developers.
According to the award description, surgeons suture plastic ports into the brain’s blood vessels and use them to circulate cell-free artificial blood containing oxygen and nutrients. An AI feedback loop keeps pressure, temperature and fluid composition within physiological limits in real time. An anesthetic suppresses electrical activity: the brain consumes oxygen and responds to drugs, while showing no behavior consistent with consciousness. An independent bioethics board oversees donation and tissue handling.
ARPA-H identifies a specific bottleneck in drug development as the reason for the grant: mice and organoids grown in culture poorly reproduce the vascular architecture, cellular diversity and accumulated disease-related damage of an aged human brain. The award description identifies this as the main reason drugs for neurodegenerative diseases fail in the late, most expensive stages of clinical trials. A June analysis of the failure of mouse models in Alzheimer’s disease in Nature Aging reported that more than 300 interventions had helped mice, while only a handful had worked in humans. The grant comes through an ARPA-H office that funds tissue and organ repair and regeneration, alongside AI modeling of living biological systems. ExOBrain fits that remit as a platform for measuring how an actual human brain responds before a drug enters clinical trials.
The technology grew out of work by Vrselja and Nenad Sestan in 2019. They were the first to restore microcirculation and cellular metabolism in pig brains several hours after death, without restoring electrical activity. In 2022, the same laboratory extended the approach from an isolated organ to the whole body of a pig. Bexorg adapted the method for human brains and has now studied more than 700 donated brains. Biohaven used these data in an application to the FDA to test BHV-8100, a drug targeting neuronal energy metabolism.
Bexorg’s own drug candidate, BEX-001, targets mitochondrial dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases and already produces a measurable effect in donated brains within the current one-day window. The platform’s own data therefore demonstrate that it works within that window. Establishing whether the effect lasts beyond one day, how the drug accumulates with repeated dosing and what happens to tissue after injury requires weeks of observation. A one-day window cannot provide those measurements. ARPA-H is funding the engineering needed to take this already demonstrated platform from a one-day prototype to a two-week production system. Updated equipment, an improved artificial blood formulation and more precise AI control of perfusion are intended to extend the window by a factor of 14. The period for which a human brain remains viable after death is becoming an engineering parameter that can be deliberately extended.
Before this grant, BrainEx kept human brains active for one day, and the current platform can detect an initial drug response within just a few hours. Federal funding now supports a much longer window, sufficient to observe whether a gene therapy takes hold in living tissue.