Kol lab creates ‘mini brains’ to study neuro ailment

Kolkata: For the first time in India, a team of city neurologists and researchers created ‘mini brains' out of real human tissues and blood vessels to study the trigger for a neurological ailment that affects many, mostly in Kolkata's Marwari community. ‘Spinocerebellar Ataxia type-12', a disease that affects motor nerves and hinders movement, is being studied by the researchers, who are now in the process of identifying medicines that could be effective against the disease. The research confirmed that the Marwari community is genetically predisposed to the ailment, and it also stated that SA-12 affects cognitive abilities.
Inspired by neurologist Hrishikesh Kumar, head of neurology at the Institute of Neurosciences Kolkata, and led by Sumantra Chattarjee, director of the Centre for High Impact Neuroscience and Translational Applications, TCG CREST—where the study is being held—two ‘human brains' were created in the laboratory, a first in India, researchers claimed. "AS-12 creates affects gait and movement, and it makes the patient lose balance, similar to Alzheimer's. It affects the spine and the back of the brain, which plays a major role in movement and coordination. It is caused by gene type 12 and was first found in an Agarwal family. Being a small community, genetic mutations persisted and remained confined. It was Kumar who first told me about it, and it got me interested. He set up the research for us. It was a uniquely Indian challenge, and we have so many patients in Kolkata. The research is focused on brain diseases in India, of which SA-12 is an excellent example," added Chattarjee.The researchers' aim was to understand how it affects the nervous system. While doctors see the symptoms, they aimed to identify what was going wrong in the patients' brains. "We can't go inside a living patient's brain. So, one creates animal models for pre-clinical trials, and that is how it works traditionally. But medicines developed based on findings from animal model research don't always work in humans. So, we needed human brains. We can't take cells from the brain like other organs since we need to penetrate the skull. So, we extracted a piece of skin or blood from a patient to replicate their brain. It was done through induced pluripotent stem cells that can become any cell in the body. Now, we had a way of creating these cells that we drove to turn into brain cells through molecular biology and other methods," said Chattarjee.The cells were grown in a petri dish to develop into a full-fledged human brain that was a replica of a real patient's brain. "It was developed over months, with all the neurons and brain cells. Now, we have a diseased brain and another from an unaffected sibling of that patient," said Chattarji.He said, "We can use neurobiological techniques to analyse the two brains to identify what's not functioning well. We have already identified the anomalies. We are still trying to identify the nature of the targets we need to work on. It's the first of its kind in India."