A multidisciplinary team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists produced three-dimensional “brain-on-a-chip” devices capturing the neural activity of live brain cell cultures cultivated outside of the human body—and a means to model the communities of interacting neurons and their network structures as they evolve.
The work is rife with technical complexities, but those involved believe it could pave the way to pinpointing effective new countermeasures against toxins or neurological disorders disrupting brain function, such as epilepsy.
“What we set out to do is to develop and converge engineering, biology and computation to develop a more representative model of the human brain physiology and function,” Nick Fischer, staff scientist and principal investigator of the effort, told Nextgov recently. “The work that we've done is really advancing the field towards that end goal.”
The brain-focused effort is a small slice of a wide range of work through which lab insiders are replicating human systems on chip-based devices. The goal is that as the technology involved advances those devices will become more applicable to humans than any animal-based testing. Fischer noted that an ultimate aim of this specific 3D brain-on-a-chip endeavor is to develop an experimental platform that provides human-relevant data to better understand how different types of drugs and therapeutics affect the function of the human brain—via an easily reproducible and simplistic, but p ..
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