AI and stem-cell organoids may overcome brain-transplant obstacles, restoring function and revolutionizing neurological healing.
The idea of taking two humans, putting them in nearby isolation chambers, and swapping their heads is a profoundly science-fiction idea – ditto the idea of taking a human brain, and implanting it in an empty skull.
It just isn’t done – for a number of reasons. But now, in the AI age, we have reason to believe that eventually, we’ll get there, and that, at the very least, we’ll be able to help bring back function to those with brain injuries.What is the major obstacle to brain transplants, anyway? Is it the blood-brain barrier? Is it oxygen deprivation? Not really. It turns out that an abiding problem is re-connecting the brain to its core infrastructure in the central nervous system. You can’t just re-fire the spine – so the body stays paralyzed. It’s also hard to jump-start the brain signals that accomplish core function like heartbeat. “The brain receives sensory information from all over the body and sends instructions back to it, making muscles contract, the heart beat and glands secrete hormones,”while also noting that the brain itself “has the texture of soft-set blancmange.” “Removing a brain requires cutting through the 12 pairs of cranial nerves which come directly off it, and the spinal cord. Information enters and exits the brain through all these structures. See the difficulty?”“Nerves don't simply join back together. As soon as you've cut them, they typically begin to disintegrate and die, though some are more resilient to damage than others.”Then there are the legal, ethical and procedural issues, which are vast.Forming Mini-Brains with Stem Cells In a recent Ted Talk in Boston, Johns Hopkins scientist Annie Kathuria explains how scientists are working hard on growing our gray matter in labs – starting with an impassioned plea for empathy, for those dealing with traumatic brain injury. “These stem cells are now transplantable,” she said. “They can be transplanted back into humans, and we are already doing that. Some of these transplantable are already in phase two, phase three clinical trials all around the U.S. and around the world.”In a way, that’s really the million-dollar question, so if you’re hungry for details on how all of this gets done, this is how Kathuria starts off: “We took the stem cell, we made the cortex, and then we made the blood vessels, the vascular network, and then we fused them together,” she said. “And all this genetic data on the right-hand side is showing the expression of the different markers, we get both cell types. … the blood vessels are made through smooth muscle cells, parasites, macrophages, immune system, all of these come together to make the blood vessels that we see that pump blood.”“It needs to communicate,” Kathuria said, of any functioning brain, organoidal or no. “And the way communicates … is through electrical function. … Once we integrate with this organ-like structure, it communicates with electric current, and it produces electric current to communicate.”“We can transport it everywhere,” she noted. “So we have a brain-like structure that is not only integrated, it's modular, it has the vascular network, and it's transplantable. So we next move on to pre-clinical small models.” Further describing research at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere, she expressed confidence that this is going somewhere. “We have the pre-clinical models, small and large injury paradigms already,” she said. “And we also have collaborators that are working on the pre-consulting and FDA side as well. So we have all the design and structure. Together we can save humanity, heal the brain, potentially move the field of transplant , and have this in the next five years as a horizon for phase one studies, hopefully.”is best known as the creator of the two-headed dog, who experimented on this kind of thing long before we got our current capabilities. Demikhov, who expired in the 1990s, would be only one of millions rolling in their graves to see the new way we’re working on this scientific problem. If you’re now contemplating all kinds of transformational brain work in the next decade, you’re not alone. What will we see in our lifetimes? Who knows?
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