He says the mini-brains can be used to study Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and even autism.
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And about 95 per cent of the drugs that look promising when tested in animal models fail when tested in humans, said Hartung, who is also director of the school’s Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing.
“While rodent models have been useful, we are not 150lb rats”.
Testing drugs and investigating how disease works will be more effective using the tiny mini-brains derived from human cells instead of animals because “we’re not 150-pound rats”, researchers said.
Hartung and his colleagues created the mini-brains using what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs-adult cells genetically reprogrammed to an embryonic stem cell-like state and then stimulated to grow into brain cells. Once it becomes more easily available, it will make a huge impact in the world of brain research.
“While the technology is still maturing, there is great potential for using these assays to more accurately develop [and] test safety and effectiveness of new treatments before they are used in individuals with mental illness”, Insel said in the release.
The mini-brains are barely visible to the naked eye and are not shaped like brains, but the tiny balls of cells function and interact similar to the real thing, researchers will report in a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on February 13.
“They’re doing something very similar, even the types of cells they’re seeing is similar to what we’re seeing”, Tanzi said, adding that he questioned whether the new brains are more “standardised” than others.
One of the biggest obstacles we face in developing new cures for old diseases is that we lose a lot of time and money with testing, not to mention that we put a lot of animals through tests that most often end with them dead. Trials to study viral infections, trauma, and stroke have already begun.
The applications for the mini-brain cover nearly the entirety of neuropharmacological research. Larger brain models also have development limits and eventually the internal neurons die, since they lack the structure of a body – namely a blood supply to their center – that would support them.
They are so realistic they even show spontaneous electrophysiological activity, which can be recorded with electrodes. Balls of neurons which originate directly from humans may allow scientists to gain a much more accurate insight into the way a living person would react to a drug or treatment, than had it been tested on a laboratory mouse or rat. Thousands of exact copies of the brains can be produced in a batch; a hundred brains fit in the same petri dish.
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“This is in the best interest of patients and for saving animals”, wrote the researchers. The published research features cells recreated with conditions of Parkinson’s disease, which is believed to develop out of a mix of genetic and environmental factors. To test them, researchers placed a mini-brain on an array of electrodes and listened to the spontaneous electrical communication of the neurons as test drugs were added.
