Good news for people who worry about the inhumane treatment of lab rats. In the near future it may be possible to test for new drugs without the need for animal testing at all. Instead, new therapies will be tried out on a human brain. But don’t worry. This isn’t Black Mirror and we’re not talking about real people. Instead we’re talking about a “mini-brain platform” that would allow for more humane testing to occur.
Originally developed by researchers at John Hopkins University, and then commercialized by AxoSim, the platform could become a real game-changer in the expensive and never-ending search for new drugs.
As Live Science puts it, “This is your bedbug-size brain on drugs. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are growing ‘mini-brains’ — smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — that may contain enough human brain cells to be useful in studying drug addiction and other neurological diseases.
The mini-brains, grown in a laboratory dish, could one day reduce the need for the use of laboratory animals to conduct this type of research or to test therapeutic drugs, the researchers said.
Labs from around the world have been racing to grow these and other organoids — microscopic, yet primitively functional versions of livers, kidneys, hearts and brains grown from real human cells. The version of the mini-brain from Johns Hopkins represents an advance over others reported in the last three years, in that it is quickly reproducible and contains many types of brain cells that interact with each other, just like a real brain, the researchers said.”
But what if these mini-brains were to develop, um, a mind of their own?!? In that case wouldn’t this research be even more inhumane than animal testing?! In theory, yes. But, I’ll leave that speculation for the ethicists. And Charlie Brooker.
Are Mini Brains the Greatest Idea Ever?
Leave a comment