Stanford grows functioning human brain cells inside mice, Nature study targets psychiatric disease

NerdyRodent · x · 2026-09-17

A Stanford team led by Prof. Sergiu Pașca has engineered mice with functioning human cells in their brains, published in Nature, with imaging showing connections between the human cells and the rest of the mouse brain. The goal is to study psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders that mice don't naturally develop — psychiatry has among the lowest clinical trial success rates, and drugs that work in animal models often fail dramatically in clinic. Researchers stress these are not 'mice that think like humans', and the work underwent independent ethical scrutiny.

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