Irina Shlionskaya

In science fiction, scientists easily transplant brains from one body to another. Is this possible in real life? It is not yet possible to answer the question unequivocally, but research on this topic is already underway.
So, recently, Russian doctors managed to make the human brain temporarily function outside the body. In the treatment of malignant brain tumours, the main obstacle to the administration of chemotherapy drugs is the blood-brain barrier, which protects against infections.

However, domestic scientists managed to develop a technique in which concentrated doses of the drug are injected into the brain, affecting the tumour, but safe for the functioning of the organ itself. To do this, the brain is temporarily connected to an autonomous artificial blood supply system - or rather, to a heart-lung machine.
The first patient to whom the new technique was applied (its scientific name is chemoperfusion ) was a 45-year-old woman with glioblastoma. Operation was successfully completed. Previously, experiments were carried out on primates - 18 baboons. “After a series of experiments, we have identified one of the safest methods of surgical access for this treatment,” said Petr Shegai, deputy director for science at the National Medical Research Centre of Radiology. But all the animals generally felt normal. After the procedure, we did not record any neurological disorders in them."

Now it is planned to apply the method to 10 more human patients, for whom other methods of treatment were ineffective or unsafe. And at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, located in Pushchino, a working mini-copy of the human brain was completely built. It belongs to the so-called organelles - small three-dimensional structures that mimic certain organs. Although stem cells are usually used to create organelles, in this case, scientists took mature rat brain cells, planting them on a special substrate - a matrix.

"To create this substrate, we used nanofibers 100 nanometers thick, the size of which is close to the structures that are present in a normal brain," commented Olga Antonova , one of the authors of the project, a researcher at ITEB RAS , which takes into account not only cellular interaction, but also the interaction of cells with the matrix, the external environment." According to Antonova, with this method of cultivation, neurospheres are formed very quickly - in a day, while when using stem cells it takes about a week. Also, the cells themselves are required much less than with the traditional method.

In the future, the mini-model of the brain is planned to be used both for analysing the processes occurring in a healthy brain, and for studying the patterns of development of neurodegenerative diseases, for example, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease, as well as developing effective methods of therapy for these ailments. Yes, we are not talking about brain transplantation or implantation of artificial thinking organs yet - the neural connections are too complicated. But there is no doubt that by experimenting in this area, science and medicine will one day reach the point where it becomes possible.
-- Pravda.ru