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Stem Cell-Derived Brain Mimics Predict Chemical Toxicity

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: September 23rd, 2015, 8:00pm UTC

MTorrice writes: Scientists in Wisconsin have grown three-dimensional brain-like tissue structures from human embryonic stem cells. These new structures are easy to grow and contain vascular cells and microglia, a type of immune cell. The breakthrough may change the way we test drugs and chemicals for their effect on the human brain. Currently most tests use multiple generations of rats and cost about $1 million to test one chemical. ldquo;In the near term, the approach might be more valuable to identify pathways and mechanisms of toxicity,rdquo; says William Murphy, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin. ldquo;We are gathering so much data on responses of these human brain mimics to known toxic chemicals that we can start to understand the signaling pathways affected by the chemicals. Not just whether, but how the chemicals are affecting the developing human brain.rdquo;pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Stem+Cell-Derived+Brain+Mimics+Predict+Chemical+Toxicity%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1YC3wPl"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F09%2F23%2F225254%2Fstem-cell-derived-brain-mimics-predict-chemical-toxicity%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/23/225254/stem-cell-derived-brain-mimics-predict-chemical-toxicity?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/09/23/225254/stem-cell-derived-brain-mimics-predict-chemical-toxicity?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/hp7GN709r1I" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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