The scientists making mini-brains in a jar
BRAINS can only be properly examined after death when dementia has already done its damage.
This means it’s difficult to know what goes on in the early stages of disease.
But a team at University College London is creating mini-brains from skin samples. Selina Wray, professor of molecular neuroscience at University College London’s Institute of Neurology, who is leading the study, said: ‘With these mini-brains, we can look for the very earliest changes that are happening in dementia.’
To make the mini-brains, skin cells are taken from volunteers, and modified in the laboratory so they become stem cells – ‘building-block’ cells that have the ability to transform into any type of tissue.
Scientists then use other chemicals to make them become brain cells, which naturally cluster together.
Each pea-sized mini-brain, pictured above right, can be used to study the development of dementia. The volunteers who have donated their cells all carry mutations to genes known to cause Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia – a dementia that usually affects people aged 45 to 65. But none of them has symptoms yet.
Prof Wray hopes the research will help scientists understand why no two people experience Alzheimer’s the same way, despite having the same genes.
‘It could help us explain why some people get symptoms at 50, and others at 60,’ she said.
‘We can also start using drugs to see if we can restore levels of proteins to normal, and at what stage we need to intervene to do that.’