United States: Experts have developed a brain pain network by culturing four essential clusters of human nerve cells in laboratory dishes.
The experimental system described in Nature exhibits potential for pain research purposes both in understanding syndromes and developing drug screening techniques, according to Stanford researchers.
More about the findings
According to Dr. Stephen Waxman, a professor at Yale School of Medicine, “It’s exciting,” npr.org reported.
Today, researchers use animals and single nerve cells to validate potential pain drugs because the behavioral patterns of the human brain remain distinct from those of both testing methods.
Pain pathway in a dish could aid search for new analgesic drugs – NPR – "It's exciting," says Dr. Stephen Waxman, a professor at Yale School of Medicine who was not involved in the research. Currently, prospective pain … – https://t.co/w1ZjihjBLL
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Furthermore, along with this new system, which is known as a brain assembloid, “we have a miniature nervous system that might be a very useful platform,” as Waxman stated.
The scientists created this model to generate a laboratory simulation of the pain signal chain activation following sensory exposure to painful stimuli, according to Stanford University professor Dr. Sergiu Pașca.
The laboratory team of Dr. Sergiu Pașca developed four dissimilar brain organoids because they functioned as spherical clusters of human nerve cells existing in laboratory dishes.
Touch a hot stove, for example, and special cells in the skin “send that information all the way to the spinal cord,” as per Pașca.
“Then the spinal cord will relay it up to the thalamus deep in the brain, and then all the way to the outer layer of the brain, which is the cortex,” the expert noted.
Researchers adopted laboratory methods to get each organoid developed into one particular neural tissue structure from the pain transmission chain.
“And then we put them together, really put them in close proximity, and watched them as they connected with each other,” Pașca noted.
The laboratory development took more than six months before the assembly accomplished its objective of forming connections between its four organoids, npr.org reported.
Additionally, the nerve cells also spontaneously began “working in a coordinated fashion across the four parts of this assembloid,” added Pașca.