Human brain tissue transplanted into mice that lack a key part of their brains can grow to occupy most of the vacant space and wire into the animals’ nervous systems.
That’s according to a study published on 16 September in Nature1, which describes the most extensive integration of human brain cells into an animal so far. The experimental strategy overcomes hurdles that have long stymied researchers studying neuropsychiatric illness in laboratory-grown brain tissue.
The hybrid animals offer an unprecedented way to test drugs and study diseases that involve abnormal brain development such as cerebral palsy, says study co-author Sergiu Pașca, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California. “We now have a very powerful new system” for understanding “what makes the human brain unique and uniquely susceptible to disease”, he says.
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