Human brain cells have been successfully implanted and incorporated into newborn rats, opening up a new avenue for the investigation of difficult-to-treat psychiatric conditions including schizophrenia and autism.
It is extremely challenging to study how these situations arise because neither animals nor humans can be easily subjected to investigation.
More than a dozen different brain areas have already been assembled in small parts by scientists using stem cells in petri dishes.
However, according to Sergiu Pasca, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University and the study’s principal author, ‘neurons in rats don’t develop to the size which a real neuron in an actual human brain would grow.’
They also are unable to predict the symptoms that a flaw may produce when removed from a body.
Young rats’ brains were transplanted with organoids, collections of human brain cells, in order to get around those restrictions.
The age of the rats was crucial since human neurons have previously been implanted into adult rats, but an animal’s brain stops developing at a certain age, restricting the integration of implanted cells.
‘We discovered that these organoids can grow relatively large, become vascularized (receive nutrition) by the rat, and can cover about a third of a rat’s (brain) hemisphere by transplanting them at these early stages,’ according to Pasca.
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