Animal testing may soon be a thing of the past: researchers have successfully developed “mini-brains” which would obviate animal testing for the effectiveness and safety of experimental drugs.
According to Motherboard, research was primarily conducted at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and was detailed today at a conference for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The “mini-brains” in question are not tiny, fully functioning brains. Rather, they are made up of neurons and cells of the human brain which are capable of replicating some of the brain’s functionality. They are, essentially, tiny balls of brain cells.
“Ninety-five percent of drugs that look promising when tested in animal models fail once they are tested humans at great expense of time and money,” study leader Thomas Hartung, Professor and Chair for Evidence-based Toxicology at the Bloomberg School.
“While rodent models have been useful, we are not 150-pound rats. And even though we are not balls of cells either, you can often get much better information from these balls of cells than from rodents.”
These balls of cells, or “mini-brains,” are only about 350 micrometers in diameter, which is about the size of the eye of a housefly. Skin cells from healthy adults were used as the starting point for the brains, then stimulated to grow into braincells and then cultivated for eight weeks.
While this is an exciting development in terms of drug testing, the applications past that are not necessarily clear at this point.
“We don’t have the first brain model nor are we claiming to have the best one,” said Hartung. “But this is the most standardized one. And when testing drugs, it is imperative that the cells being studied are as similar as possible to ensure the most comparable and accurate results.”