Human Nurons in a Living Disease Brain

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Human nurons took their customary time to mature, between six and 12 months. This suggested that this prolonged development timing is incoded intrinsically in the nurons themselves. The team has also transplanted healthy human nurons into the brains of mice with a genetic predisposition to altsimus disease. That the huan nurons settled into a foreign brain and worked normally was surprising. It hints that cell transplants might be used to repair damaged brain circuits in the future.

The development of brain chimaeras – made up of human and animal neurons – is an area of research that has hugely expanded in the past five years. Proponents say that these systems are yielding important insights into health and disease, but others say the chimeras represent an ethical grey zone, because of the potential to blur the line between humans and other animals, or to recapitulate human-like cognition in an animal.

This is an audio version of our Feature: Hybrid brains: the ethics of transplanting human neurons into animals

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