Bioquark, a biotechnolgy company from Philadelphia believes brain death is not as irreversible as most people think, and claims to have come up with a series of injections capable of “resetting” the brain, essentially bringing patients back to life.

Up until a few years ago, a person was declared dead when their heart stopped beating and they were no longer breathing. But then we came up with advanced medical technology capable of pumping oxygen into the body and keeping major organs in working condition. All but one, the brain. Today, most countries define death as the permanent loss of brain stem function. Once someone suffers complete and irreversible loss of brain function, they are officially declared dead. But one company wants to prove that brain death isn’t the end.

Bioquark originally announced its intention to carry out a series of tests in India in order to prove the efficacy of a treatment based on stem cell injections in resetting the brain, last year. The initial trial was supposed to be carried out in India, but the company’s plan was thwarted by the Indian Council of Medical Research. But the company didn’t give up on the revolutionary discovery, and has recently announced that the tests will be carried out in an undisclosed South American country, in the near future.

Ira Pastor, the CEO of Bioquark, and his collaborator, Indian orthopedic surgeon Himanshu Bansal, have yet to announce the details of the tests, but according to the study record of the canceled trial, we can get a pretty good idea of how they plan to reverse brain death.

Bioquark planned to examine patients aged 12 to 65 that had been declared brain dead following traumatic brain injury, using MRI, to look for signs of potential brain death reversal. They would then harvest stem cells from the patients’ own blood and inject them back into their body. Then, the patients would receive a dose of peptides injected into their spinal cord, and go through a 15-day period of nerve stimulation involving lasers and median nerve stimulation that the biotech company hopes will reverse brain death.

It’s unclear how Bioquark plans to get consent from the patients involved in the upcoming trial, as they are all technically dead.

These controversial test are apparently part of a larger project on human neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation called ReAnima, of which Ira Pastor is on the advisory board. He told the Daily Mail that “The mission of the ReAnima Project is to focus on clinical research in the state of brain death, or irreversible coma, in subjects who have recently met the Uniform Determination of Death Act criteria, but who are still on cardio-pulmonary or trophic support – a classification in many countries around the world known as a ‘living cadaver’.”