Advanced Brain Organoid

Scientists have managed to grow an artificial mini-brain with its own circulatory system

DailyTechInfo based on NEW ATLAS: Lab-made mini-brains are sprouting their own blood vessels

At the time, we already told our readers that in 2015, scientists from Brown University managed to develop a technology for growing an artificial mini-brain with a complex three-dimensional structure of intertwined nerve cells of several types. Such artificial formations are an alternative to laboratories-on-a-chip of the appropriate type, and they allow testing new methods of treatment and the effects of drugs without using experimental animals for this. Continuing to work with the grown mini-brains, the researchers discovered an amazing phenomenon, a system of blood vessels began to form inside some of them over time, which significantly expands the scope of their use and allows for research related to strokes, concussions and Alzheimer's disease.

Each mini-brain is less than one millimeter in size and they are grown thousands at a time from samples of nerve cells of different types taken from live laboratory rats. These mini-brains, of course, cannot provide a thought process, but the neurons included in them are electrically active. These artificial formations are the most accurate model of a real brain, and with their help, scientists have the opportunity to directly study the processes of development of nerve cells, the consequences of diseases and the results of the action of new drugs.

But neurons and synapses are only part of the brain model. When working, the brain requires blood flow, which supplies it with oxygen and nutrients, but in all types of artificial brains grown by various groups of scientists, this component was completely absent. During their work, scientists from Brown University noticed that after a while, approximately two-thirds of artificial mini-brains began to form nerve tissue seals, which then began to degenerate into blood vessel tissue.

The images of the resulting formations allowed scientists to identify the type of new cells and binding proteins, which turned out to be identical to the cells and proteins of blood vessels, and the formed vessels themselves are located inside and are definitely intended for transporting blood. The map of the circulatory system compiled by scientists showed that the structure of this system is not as dense and branched as the circulatory system of the real brain, its complexity fully corresponds to the small complexity of the mini-brain, which can exist for only one to two weeks.

Having received such a "gift" at their disposal, scientists have already begun to use artificial mini-brains, exposing them to oxygen deficiency and glucose deficiency and observing how all this affects the circulatory system. And in the near future, scientists will combine a mini-brain with a microfluidic system that will arrange normal pumping of blood through the circulatory system, and this, in turn, will allow them to simulate a stroke and symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.

Article by Boutin et al. A Three-Dimensional Neural Spheroid Model for Capillary-Like Network Formation is published in The Journal of Neuroscience Methods – VM.

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