First 3D-printed functional human brain tissue grows like the real thing

You would think if we could get something as advanced as brain tissue to grow, then we could also get something as simple as hyaline cartilage to regenerate. I’ve been following the research on it for 14 years now since I had a knee injury from running that caused focal cartilage defects, and the rate of progress in the field is absolutely glacial.

The latest research articles in the medical journals are still talking about BMP-2 growth factors and mesenchymal stem cells being the future of cartilage repair, but I now treat this a bit like nuclear fusion in the sense that we always seem to be about 10-20 years away from productionizing it.

From the article:

> The tissue still has enough structure to hold together, but it is soft enough to allow the neurons to grow into each other and start talking to each other,” Zhang said. “Our tissue stays relatively thin, and this makes it easy for the neurons to get enough oxygen and enough nutrients from the growth media.

Seems like this would be great for hyaline cartilage as well, as the tissue is avascular and receives nutrients primarily via diffusion. I don’t have a background in the field, but it would be nice if we could take some of these cutting-edge techniques and attempt to apply them to more mundane things like joint degeneration.

>“The tissue still has enough structure to hold together, but it is soft enough to allow the neurons to grow into each other and start talking to each other,”

While everyone's worried about sentient AI annihilating humanity, some guy with a PrusaBio Mk7+ accidentally prints a superintelligence in his basement.

This sounds like the beginning of a Horror movie, but also colors me hopeful for a future where people born with my mothers disease (SCA) will have some kind of cure to halt or revert the loss of brain tissue ?

We still know so little about the actual micro scale and macro scale structure and connection graph of the brain. This is a neat advance in tissue integrity but it is not a brain. It's like melting sand into a pile that holds itself and considering it an advance in computing.

Still cool through.

On a side note, the brain is amazing. The more we learn about AI the more amazing it is that the brain emerges from a relatively sparse instruction set, self assembles from widely available local resources, and becomes a general purpose computing engine able to simulate enough of the world internally to promote survival and propagation of its instruction set.

I bet growing lumps of these and keeping them in nutrient soaked vats will be cheaper than using LLMs to generate spam...

Maybe grow nanotube like transceivers that the brain prefers to grow on to then you can train it to make classifiers. Then make the doomers really piss their pants

So, now setting a goal - let's replace with it LLMs ;)

> First 3D-printed functional human brain tissue grows like the real thing

Growing it is easy. Using it is hard.

But does it taste like the real thing?

We still know so little about the actual micro scale and macro scale structure and connection graph of the brain. This is a neat advance in tissue integrity but it is not a brain. It's like melting sand into a pile that holds itself and considering it an advance in computing.

Still cool through.

Spinal disk regeneration is the one im waiting for

Aw sweet, man made horrors beyond comprehension

Url changed from https://www.popsci.com/science/3d-printed-brain-tissue/, which points to this.

Head cheeses when??