🧠 Scientists Have Grown an Analogue of an Entire Human Brain
Scientists at Johns Hopkins University have created the world's first organoid that mimics an entire human brain, complete with blood vessels and full neural activity.
The researchers first grew neural cells from the separate regions of the brain and rudimentary forms of blood vessels in separate lab dishes. Then they "glued" the tissues together with special proteins. Once the sections grew together, they began to function as a single brain, producing electrical signals and forming connections between different areas.
In terms of its characteristics, the organoid resembles the brain of a 40-day-old human fetus. The laboratory samples contain 6-7 million neurons, about 12,000 times fewer than an adult human. However, the organoid comprises about 80% of the cell types commonly seen at the early stages of human brain development.
Such organoids, miniature biomodels of real organs, should help in the development of drugs to treat autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, and other disorders that affect large areas of the brain. Currently, up to 96% of drugs for these conditions do not even pass the first phase of clinical trials: they are tested on mice and other animals, whose brains are very different from those of humans.
"Whole-brain organoids let us watch disorders develop in real time, see if treatments work, and even tailor therapies to individual patients," explains Annie Kathuria, an assistant professor in JHU's Department of Biomedical Engineering.
