Scientists Recreate Brain Circuit in Lab For First Time

Scientists have recreated in a laboratory the sensory pathway that transmits feelings of pain to the human brain, in a breakthrough that could lead to better treatments. Financial Times: A team at Stanford University in California is the first to combine different neurons grown from human stem cells into a functioning brain circuit in a lab dish. Their experiments, published in Nature on Wednesday, illustrate scientists' rapid progress in replicating living tissues and organs through synthetic biology.

When the Stanford scientists exposed the brain circuit they had created to sensory stimulants, they observed waves of electrical activity travelling along it. The molecule that makes chilli peppers hot, capsaicin, immediately induced a strong response.

The synthetic brain circuits could be used to screen for better-targeted therapies for pain that tone down excessive waves of neurotransmission, without affecting the brain's reward circuitry as opioids do, project leader [Sergiu] Pasca said. The assembloids themselves cannot be said to 'feel pain,' he emphasised: 'They transmit nervous signals that are processed by a second pathway going deeper into the brain and giving us the aversive, emotional component of pain.'

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