Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Scientists have recreated in a laboratory the sensory pathway that transmits feelings of pain to the human brain, in a breakthrough that could lead to better treatments.A team at Stanford University in California is the first to combine different neurons grown from human stem cells into a functioning brain circuit in a lab dish. Their experiments, published in Nature on Wednesday, illustrate scientists\u2019 rapid progress in replicating living tissues and organs through synthetic biology.When the Stanford scientists exposed the brain circuit they had created to sensory stimulants, they observed waves of electrical activity travelling along it. The molecule that makes chilli peppers hot, capsaicin, immediately induced a strong response.\u00a9 Stanford UniversitySergiu Pa\u0219ca, the project leader, said he expected the research to accelerate progress in understanding how the human nervous system processes pain signals. \u201cNow that we can model this pathway non-invasively, without using animals, we hope to find better therapeutics for chronic pain,\u201d he said. \u201cThe best drugs we have now are opioids, derived originally from poppy seeds thousands of years ago and highly addictive.\u201d The researchers began by transforming skin cells into stem cells capable of generating almost any human tissue or organ. They then used chemical signals to make the stem cells form four types of \u201corganoid\u201d \u2014 tiny living balls representing the different regions of the pain pathway, from sensory neurons on the skin to cortical neurons in the brain.Finally the four different organoids were lined up side by side in a culture dish. After about 100 days they grew together into a synthetic representation of a brain circuit called an \u201cassembloid\u201d, almost 1cm long with 4mn cells. Neural connections linked the component organoids and patterns of synchronised signalling emerged.\u201cYou would never have been able to see this wavelike synchrony if you couldn\u2019t watch all four organoids connected, simultaneously,\u201d said Pa\u0219ca. \u201cThe brain is more than the sum of its parts.\u201dThe synthetic brain circuits could be used to screen for better-targeted therapies for pain that tone down excessive waves of neurotransmission, without affecting the brain\u2019s reward circuitry as opioids do, Pa\u0219ca said. The assembloids themselves cannot be said to \u201cfeel pain\u201d, he emphasised: \u201cThey transmit nervous signals that are processed by a second pathway going deeper into the brain and giving us the aversive, emotional component of pain.\u201dEven so, Pa\u0219ca acknowledged the need to consider the ethical implications of organoid research as more complex brain circuits are created in the lab: \u201cWe are thinking very carefully about how this work proceeds, in the face of the immense need to understand psychiatric disorders and the risk of building something closer to a human brain.\u201dGuo-li Ming, professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania \u2014 who was not involved in the Stanford project \u2014 praised it for giving insights into the complexities of human neural circuitry that cannot be modelled with animals, and into how these human features lead to neurological disorders. \u201cThis model provides the opportunity to study the complex neural network activity linking sensory input to the cortex, which was previously not feasible,\u201d she said.Stanford has applied for a patent on the assembloid research but has not yet decided how to commercialise it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Scientists have recreated in a laboratory the sensory pathway that transmits feelings of pain to the human brain, in a breakthrough that could lead to better<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-269652","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}