Researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have developed manmade artificial brains that could revolutionize neuroscience. However, they are not exact replicas of the human brain, but instead tiny models made of human neurons and cells that have the overall size of 350 micrometers and are made up of adult human stem cells.
The method that the scientists applied to create these tiny organs is by managing to make human skin cells act like stem cells, which then were made to morph to grow into brain cells.
Even if small in size, these tiny brains can actually be mass produced and could easily replace animal testing of drugs and study regarding numerous mental health disorders such as Alzheimer’s or autism. Because they exhibit characteristics very similar to the human brain, they can be easily used in laboratory experiments and probably end up earning better results than experimenting on lab rats for example.
These artificial brains are also called organoids and elicit much better results and responses to treatments whenever the scientists attempt to test a drug on them, simply due to the resemblance to how real, full-fledged human brains work.
However, these miniscule brains do take roughly 10 weeks spent in special incubators to finally develop into an organ that could be experimented and tested on. Researchers said that while testing drugs and studying their effect on rodent brains has earned some results too, humans function differently than the lab rats do and because of that, results will differ on way too many occasions – roughly 95%.
One could argue that the tiny brains could not be a fair representation of a full-fledged, real scale brain, but as long as they are made from human cells and are bound to react in the same way as the real thing, they are a lot more likely to return more accurate results.
The best part about the ability to create these small-scale brains is the fact that researchers can downright take cells from a patient with a particular genetic disorder to create a tiny replica of his brain and be able to easily target the particular mechanisms of it in order to triangulate the phenomenon better.
This is what the scientists reported after only the first phase of the experiment with the stem-cell based tiny brains. In time, the technology could mature to a level where the replicas would be a lot more accurate and be able to mimic the way the human brain works even better. This could lead to numerous breakthroughs in neuroscience and its implications in a great number of mental illnesses.
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