(NewsNation) — Researchers trying to study human disease conditions have turned to mice by transplanting lab-grown human brain cells into the small rodents.
The study, published in the journal Nature, found that the human neurons successfully integrated into the animals’ brains. Researchers said the mice were engineered to be born without a cortex or hippocampus, allowing space for the brain cells to grow inside.
“For the past two decades, there’s been a quest to try to build models of the human brain outside of the human body,” says Dr. Sergiu Pașca, a professor at Stanford University. “This is not going to replace all the models we had before, but it’s going to provide us access to other aspects of human brain function that would be very difficult to study otherwise.”
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To conduct their analysis, Pasca and his team spent years creating the mice to establish better scientific models for researching neurodegenerative disease. The decision to experiment on mice came after previous studies on human organoids to observe the early stages of brain development.
The organoids flourished in the bred mice, feeding on the skull’s fluid before connecting to the blood vessels in the brain. As a result, the mice’s human neurons expanded to nearly 4 million.
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“They actually have quite good locomotion,” Pașca noted. “They don’t do that well in memory tasks, but you wouldn’t be able to tell when you look at these animals that they’re lacking half of the volume of their brain.”
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To clarify how the vermin could provide answers on brain disorders, some of the mice were exposed to low oxygen for hours.
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Researchers discovered the human brain tissue in the mice comprised of rare cells, von Economo neurons. Von Economo neurons are among the first to succumb in frontotemporal dementia. The low oxygen resulted in the mice having trouble walking.
“We’re trying to see whether mutations that are associated with frontotemporal dementia are making the cells uniquely susceptible to disease,” Pașca explained. “And why? Why is this happening?”
Researchers suggest the transplant could revolutionize the study of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia by allowing scientists to observe human brain cells functioning inside a living brain.
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