LONGMEADOW – Longmeadow native, Stephano G. Daniele, and his team at Yale University in New Haven, CT, have successfully revived activity in a pig’s brain four hours after death.

“It questions the idea [that] cells die immediately,” said Daniele, an M.D./Ph.D. candidate.

The researchers at Yale have been working on the study for three and a half to four years. Their work was featured on the April 17 cover of the journal Nature.

The experiment had multiple challenges. A perfusion device, which emulates biological organs that detoxify the blood, was created and a blood-substitute solution, called Hemopure, was run through it. Daniele explained that when death occurs, changes happen in the blood. To combat that, the researchers added cell-death and stress blockers, and neuronal activity blockers.

The solution was then fed to 32 pig brains through a surgical procedure that “hijacks” the vascular system to the brain.

“In the past,” Daniele said, we’ve only worked on small tissues.“ He said that cells were harvested and cultured in a petri-dish. This new work dealt with an intact brain.

Daniele said getting neurons in a deceased brain to fire lays the groundwork as a new way to protect cells in the brain following an injury.

“It allows us to hopefully help stroke patients or cardiac arrest patients where blood flow has been cut off,” Daniele said, though he cautioned those treatments were a long way off.

Daniele, who was class president of Longmeadow High School and graduated in 2008, said he was interested in pursuing a neuroscience surgical specialty when he graduates from Yale.