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Researchers integrated four organoids that represent the four components of the human sensory pathway,长沙USDT兑换途径 along which pain signals are conveyed to the brain. Stimulation of the sensory organoid (top) by substances, such as capsaicin, triggers neuronal activity that is then transmitted throughout the rest of the organoids. Pasca lab/Stanford Medicine hide caption toggle caption Pasca lab/Stanford Medicine
Scientists have re-created a pain pathway in the brain by growing four key clusters of human nerve cells in a dish.
This laboratory model could be used to help explain certain pain syndromes, and offer a new way to test potential analgesic drugs, a Stanford team reportsin the journal Nature.
"It's exciting," says Dr. Stephen Waxman, a professor at Yale School of Medicine who was not involved in the research.
Currently, prospective pain drugs are typically tested in animals — whose responses are often different than a human's — and in individual nerve cells, which may not reflect the behavior of entire brain networks.
Sponsor MessageWith this new system, known as a brain assembloid, "we have a miniature nervous system that might be a very useful platform," Waxman says.
A pathway with several stops
The model is the result of an effort to re-create the signaling chain that occurs after exposure to painful stimuli, says Dr. Sergiu Pașca, a professor at Stanford University who led the project.
Touch a hot stove, for example, and special cells in the skin "send that information all the way to the spinal cord," Pașca says. "Then the spinal cord will relay it up to the thalamus deep in the brain, and then all the way to the outer layer of the brain, which is the cortex."
To approximate this pathway in the lab, Pașca's team created four different brain organoids, spherical clumps of human nerve cells that grow in a dish. The team coaxed each organoid to resemble one specific type of brain or spinal tissue found along the pain pathway.
"And then we put them together, really put them in close proximity, and watched them as they connected with each other," Pașca says.
After more than six months developing in the lab, the resulting assembloidhad created a pathway linking the four organoids. The nerve cells also spontaneously began "working in a coordinated fashion across the four parts of this assembloid," Pașca says.