Mini Brains – Mega Plans

Surprised much? Wait till you hear this- they can fit into the head of a ball pin!

Yes, these tiny things which are barely even visible are balls of human neurons and other cells, capable of mimicking the brain’s functionality. Moreover, they could be the future of drug testing.

The studies carried out on animal models are more often than not unsuccessful while being applied to humans. The development of these mini-brains could revolutionize brain research and drug testing and allow us to be less dependent on animals.

“Ninety-five percent of drugs that look promising when tested in animal models fail once they are tested in humans at great expense of time and money. While rodent models have been useful, we are not 150-pound rats. And even though we are not balls of cells either, you can often get much better information from these balls of cells than from rodents” says lead scientist of the study, Mr.Thomas Hartung.

Thomas Hartung and his colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health created the mini-brains using induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs that are primarily adult cells that are genetically reprogrammed to an embryonic stem cell-like state, which are then

stimulated to grow into brain cells. These cells are derived from the skin of healthy adults. Additionally, they extremely convenient, given a hundred to thousands of them can be produced in a single batch. They can be grown over a period of two months with spontaneous morphing of four types of neurons and two types of cells; these cells quickly connected to one another and even exhibited spontaneous electrophysiological activity. This activity was observed by using an array of electrodes and significant electrical communication of neurons was found as test drugs were being added.

Efforts to study viral infections, trauma, and stroke through these mini-brains are already in process. Mr. Hartung plans to make these structures available through his start-up company, Organome, to study Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and even autism by the end of this year.