A biotech company says it put dopamine-making cells into people’s brains::The experiment to treat Parkinson’s is a critical early test of stem cells’ potential to tackle serious disease.
If we can get to a point where I am retired and can get a Joywire like in Rimworld, I am definitely doing it.
I’m glad I’m not the only person to immediately think of the Joywire from RimWorld.
Sounds kinda ominous until you read the subheading haha
Oh okay! That’s weird! I am a little hesitant of having any cells injected into my brain tbh
Right? Let’s see this pass rigorous muster first.
I’ll be a guinea pig
As someone with severe depression, I’d willingly jam a hot poker through one of my eyes and into my brain if I actually thought it’d help
A) We already don’t know how neurons interconnect (eg why infants loose ~ 70% of their neuron connections between 1 and 3 years). B) That’s not how dopanime works C) That’s not how Parkinson works either
For the uninitiated, can you elaborate?
Why is this not how it works?
Sure.
The problem is that the brain is not a squishy uniform cell mess that just reacts to some chemicals (dopamine/serotonine/…). All of those are neurotransmitters to specific classes of neurons that have a very specific topological position to perform their function.
So if you just throwing in random neurons here and there, they won’t do anything. They are not contributing to any pathways.
Serotonin re-uptake inhibitors and dopamine generator drugs (aka opioids) make the signal send by the “correct” neurons that are there stronger, contributing to the desired effect.
The problem with Alzheimers is the death of “correct” neurons, that occurs before Alzheimer is manifested. So just injecting new ones is unlikely to do anything.
Moreover, the neurons don’t just live outside brain. They need to be immortalized to live in a Petri dish. And to acheive it, the only way we can go now is to add factors that in the context of human organism are considered as cancerous.
So it’s a combo of “unlikely to be efficient” and “potentially likely to lead to cancer”. With Parkinson the tradeoff might be acceptable, but this kind of projects is definitely that raises some red flags for me.
Soo kinda like the hippies. Just tech instead of chemicals…
Oh no, that’s terrible, where? Where exactly?
Is this kinda a Lifetime subscription for MDMA?
They had me in the first half ngl
If it works, it would be interesting to see if it could also work for people with other forms of brain injury/damage.
Could you use it to help restore function to someone who had a stroke?
