Scientists have developed a promising new way to study serious mental health conditions by growing tiny human brain-like tissues in a laboratory.
These small structures, often called mini-brains or brain organoids, are only about the size of a pea.
They are not real human brains and cannot think, learn, or feel emotions. Even so, they copy some important parts of the developing human brain and give researchers a rare chance to study brain cells in ways that were not possible before.
Mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder affect millions of people around the world.
They can change the way people think, feel, and behave. Schizophrenia may cause hallucinations, false beliefs, confused thinking, and trouble with daily life.
Bipolar disorder causes large changes in mood, energy, and activity levels, with periods of depression and periods of unusually high energy or excitement.
Although these illnesses have been studied for many years, doctors still do not have a simple laboratory test that can clearly diagnose them.
Many other diseases have biological signs that doctors can measure. For example, blood tests or scans can help diagnose some illnesses, and Parkinson’s disease is linked with changes in dopamine, an important chemical messenger in the brain.
Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are much harder to identify because doctors mainly depend on a patient’s symptoms, medical history, and behavior. This process can take a long time, and the two conditions sometimes look similar, making diagnosis difficult.
To explore a better approach, researchers at Johns Hopkins University collected skin and blood samples from people with schizophrenia, people with bipolar disorder, and people without mental illness.
They changed these samples into stem cells, which are special cells that can grow into many different kinds of cells in the body. The scientists then carefully guided the stem cells to develop into tiny brain organoids.
These organoids contained several important brain cell types, especially cells similar to those found in the prefrontal cortex. This area of the brain plays an important role in planning, decision-making, problem-solving, and controlling behavior. The organoids also formed myelin, a protective coating around nerve fibers that helps electrical signals travel quickly and efficiently between brain cells.
To see how these mini-brains worked, the research team placed them on small electronic chips covered with tiny electrodes. These electrodes recorded the electrical activity produced by the brain cells, much like a very small version of an electroencephalogram, or EEG. Brain cells communicate using tiny electrical signals, and these signals reveal how brain networks are working.
When the researchers compared the electrical activity of the different organoids, they found clear differences. The mini-brains grown from people with schizophrenia produced different signal patterns from those grown from people with bipolar disorder or from healthy volunteers.
The neurons fired in unique ways, creating electrical patterns that acted almost like fingerprints for each condition.
The team then used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that can discover patterns in large amounts of information. The computer studied the electrical signals and tried to identify which patient group each organoid belonged to.
At first, it reached an accuracy of up to 83%. After the scientists gently stimulated the organoids with small electrical signals to encourage more activity, the accuracy improved to 92%.
These findings suggest that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may each have their own unique patterns of electrical activity. If future studies confirm these results, doctors may one day have a more objective way to help diagnose these illnesses instead of relying mainly on interviews and observations.
The research could also improve treatment. Today, many patients need to try different medicines before finding one that works well. This process can take months or even years, and some people do not respond to commonly used medicines, including clozapine.
In the future, doctors may be able to test different medicines on a patient’s own lab-grown organoid before prescribing treatment. This could help identify the most effective medicine sooner and reduce unnecessary side effects.
The current study was small and included samples from only 12 people, so much more research is still needed. The scientists are now collecting more samples and studying how different medicines and doses affect these mini-brains. Larger studies will be needed before this method can become part of everyday medical care.
Even so, this work represents an exciting step toward more personalized mental health care. By studying living human brain cells grown safely in the laboratory, researchers may gain new understanding of illnesses that have remained difficult to explain for decades.
Better knowledge could eventually lead to faster diagnosis, improved treatments, and better quality of life for many people living with these conditions.
The research was published in the journal APL Bioengineering.
If you care about mental health, please read studies about cannabis use disorder linked to increased risk of mental diseases and some mental health drugs can cause rapid weight gain.
For more health information, please read studies that one sleepless night can reverse depression for days and scientists find better treatment for older adults with depression.
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