Scientists have found a new way to synthesize brain tissue. I've mentioned in the past about Japanese researchers creating brain tissue from stem cells. For this new work, Aston University (UK) researchers took tumor cells from a cancer patient and were able to coax them into becoming brain cells using chemical treatments. They weren't even brain tumor cells, just tumor cells from another part of the body. They then bundled these newly created neurons into neurospheres. The neurospheres are basically 3-dimensional aggregations of brain cells.The Humane Research Trust is funding this research for its potential as an alternative to animal testing. I definitely think it is a worthwhile goal to reduce animal testing as much as possible. I think eventually the need for animal testing may be eliminated or at the very least greatly reduced. However I'm not sure if this specific research will have that much of an impact. A lot of neuroscience research requires the dynamics of an entire animal brain. This research would likely only be able to simulate a relatively small subset of the complexity of a whole brain. Currently it is difficult to know what it would take to completely eliminate animal testing. Perhaps reliable computer simulations of animal/human brains will be a huge step in that direction. Maybe that used in tandem with synthesized whole brain tissue as well. I'm not sure how you can reliably simulate all aspects of brain functioning and an organisms interaction with the environment while eliminating any sort of conscious suffering.
Obviously these synthesized neurons could be used to replace existing brain tissue in disorders where it is damaged or missing (an alternative to using stem cells). Theoretically it could be used to test out certain drug therapies, though it may be limited to what it can do. Here's a snippet from the press release about this new method.
In the future, the tiny three-dimensional cell clusters, which are essentially very small models of the human nervous system, could be used to develop new treatments for diseases including Alzheimer’s, Motor Neurone and Parkinson’s Disease.I guess I'm fairly pessimistic about a lot of neurological therapies. I don't particularly see this as speeding up research that much with regards to treating those diseases. I mean there are a bunch of ways to improve brain disorders like RNA interference to knock down the functioning of proteins, gene therapy to add genes and pharmaceutical drugs. I think it is really been difficult to actually get this stuff to the market. The US regulatory market will probably only get worse in the future. I don't want to make it sound like I'm one of those neuroscience skeptic blogs because I'm definitely not. I like talking about far out ideas that are at least scientifically plausible. It's just there has been a ton of research at the preclinical level, but little has actually translated into real novel treatments.
source:brian stimulant
