Prescribing medications for psychological conditions is notoriously tricky—one drug works differently for individuals with the same condition and can even change over time in the same person. Now researchers have been able to create tiny versions of patients’ cerebral cortices in petri dishes, which would allow them to test how drugs would work on a patient’s brain before prescribing the one that works best. The study was published last week in the journal Nature Methods.
In the past, researchers figured out a way to extract stem cells from patients’ skin and to grow them into neurons in the lab. But testing drugs on neurons doesn’t give researchers any information about how the drugs affect the brain’s circuitry, or how the brain communicates within itself. This aspect is key—a number of psychiatric conditions result from disrupted development of this neurological circuitry, the study authors write.
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