lab grown brain tissue

[dragon]

Great advancement for treating brain damage. Does nothing for lost memories though.

Bioengineers have created 3D brain-like tissue in the lab and kept it alive for more than two months.

The tissue, which exhibited electrical activity, is derived from rat neurons left to multiply on a special scaffold developed by a team from the Tissue Engineering Resource Centre at Tufts University, Boston. Although the resulting material only exhibited certain characteristics of brain matter, it's worth remembering the brain is by far one of the most difficult organs to even begin engineering, considering how little we still understand about it. In the interim, we've been able to engineer blood vessels and tiny livers, and one team thinks it can bioprint a heart within a decade. This could be an opportunity, though, to learn much more.

"The brain remains one of the most important but least understood tissues in our body, in part because of its complexity as well as the limitations associated with in vivo studies," write the team behind the 3D brain tissue in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Although simpler tissues have yielded to the emerging tools for in vitro 3D tissue cultures, functional brain-like tissues have not."

Neuroscientists have indeed been able to grow neurons in the lab, but encouraging these to develop into 3D structures has proved an elusive feat. In the past, hydrogels have been used to grow cells from the primary cortex of rat brains into 2D formats. To get both white and grey matter to develop into two separate but integrated 3D tissue models, the Tufts team used both a collagen gel and a porous scaffold made from silk protein.

Like the hydrogels used in previous methods, the collagen-based option here allowed axons (the bundles that make up white matter, connect to grey matter and send nerve impulses back and forth between neurons) to thrive. The scaffold allows for those connections the axons make, to also develop. To allow for a distinction between grey and white matter though, the team decided to lop the scaffold into a doughnut-shape, before introducing the rat neurons and placing the gel in the centre. It meant that the axons had space to travel across the doughnut hole, to make connections on the other side. As those axons crisscrossed, the centre of the doughnut became a distinct region of white matter.

Compared to tissue growing in a standard, gel-based 2D environment, the doughnut home allowed for more gene expressions related to neuron growth and lasted far longer -- at last count, the cells were stable and functioning at a high level for five weeks, as opposed to the 2D environment's 24 hours. The team is already expanding on this, using six doughnut rings to extend the matter into a more organ-like structure.
Because the 3D tissue sample did in fact exhibit the kind of electrical activity we might see in a fully functioning brain, it was possible for the team to carry out a series of experiments. They believe the tissue will become something of a testbed for drugs or injury research. For instance, the team administered drugs and caused injury (dropping weights on it from a height) to the tissue, to see how the electrical functions and chemical signalling fared. These experiments were not designed to simply see what open tissue looks like once it's been abused by a team of scientists. The team wanted to see how the experiments stacked up against those carried out with animals. They found similar levels of injury were caused, and as such it could provide an alternative. Not only would this mean animal models avoid harm in the future, but the delay involved in dissecting the brain post injury would be saved.

"With the system we have, you can essentially track the tissue response to traumatic brain injury in real time," said David Kaplan, director of the Tufts centre and lead author on the study. "Most importantly, you can also start to track repair and what happens over longer periods of time."

If the team manages to extend the functions further to mimic the brain, the opportunities for research are huge. So little is understood about the billions of connections in the brain, and though this technique will not mirror those connections any time soon, it could be a path to studying the longer term impact of injury and disease.

link

[Eternal_Freedom]

Fascinating.

[Borgholio]

No worries now about a zombie apocalypse. We can just give them care packages of brain-bars and they'll be on their merry way.

[Cykeisme]

Damn, this is fascinating.

It'll be interesting to see where this leads to in the very long run.