Scientists have recreated a pathway that senses pain, using clusters of human nerve cells grown in a dish.
Pain pathway in a dish could aid search for new analgesic drugs toggle caption Pasca lab/Stanford Medicine Scientists have re-created a pain pathway in the brain by growing four key clusters of human nerve cells in a dish. This laboratory model could be used to help explain certain pain syndromes, and offer a new way to test potential analgesic drugs, a Stanford team reports in the journal Nature. "It's exciting," says Dr. Stephen Waxman , a professor at Yale School of Medicine who was not involved in the research. Currently, prospective pain drugs are typically tested in animals — whose responses are often different than a human's — and in individual nerve cells, which may not reflect the behavior of entire brain networks. Sponsor Message With this new system, known as a brain assembloid, "we have a miniature nervous system that might be a very useful platform," Waxman says. A pathway with several stops The model is the result of an effort to re-create the signaling chain that occurs after exposure to painful stimuli, says Dr. Sergiu Pașca , a professor at Stanford University who led the project. Touch a hot stove, for example, and special cells in the skin "send that information all the way to the spinal cord," Pașca says. "Then the spinal cord will relay it up to the thalamus deep in the brain, and then all the way…