New device to test effects of drugs, disease on brain

Scientists have developed a 'brain-on-a-chip' device that could help test and predict the effects of biological and chemical agents, disease, or drugs on the brain, without the need for human or animal subjects.
The device simulates the central nervous system by recording neural activity from multiple brain cell types deposited and grown onto microelectrode arrays.
The research, published in the journal PLOS One, could help scientists understand how brain cells connect and interact, combat brain disorders, determine how soldiers are affected by exposure to chemical and biological weapons and develop antidotes to counteract those effects.
"While we are not close to the point where we can fully recapitulate a brain outside of the body, this is an important step in terms of increasing complexity of these devices and moving in the right direction," said Dave Soscia from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US.

"The idea is that eventually the community gets to a point where people are confident enough in the devices that the effects they see from putting chemicals or pharmaceutical drugs into the platform environment are similar to the results we would see in the human body," said Soscia.
To recreate the regions of the brain, researchers divided the chip into four distinct areas - three sub-regions and an external region representing the brain's cortex.

They deposited primary hippocampal and cortical cells onto the electrodes, positioned based on their relative orientation in the brain, using custom-built inserts that can be removed after the cells are placed in the device to allow free communication among the different regions.

The team then monitored the cells' action potential patterns - the "bursts" of electrical energy that cells emit when communicating - and observed how the cells interacted over time.
The researchers also successfully performed tests with a four-cell insert, to prove more cell types could be used simultaneously.