---
title: "Scientists are Growing Tiny Human Brain Balls in Petri Dishes"
description: "Researchers have perfected a technique for growing miniature balls of cortical tissue—the key working tissue in the human brain—in a dish."
date: "2015-06-01"
modified: "2015-08-13"
authors:
  - name: "Fred Peterson"
    link: "https://futurism.com/authors/fredpeterson"
url: "https://futurism.com/scientists-are-growing-tiny-human-brain-balls-in-petri-dishes"
categories:
  - "Brain"
  - "Health & Medicine"
tags:
  - "neuroscience"
---

# Scientists are Growing Tiny Human Brain Balls in Petri Dishes

![](<https://futurism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/humanbrains.jpg>)

- Prior to this work scientists use a patients’ skin cells to revert to pluripotent stem cells, and then placed the stem cells in a chemical environment that would push them down a new developmental path. Until now, we hadn’t been able to organize those neurons into anything resembling the complex circuity of the human brain.
- These tiny, 3D structures function much like the outer mantle, or cortex, of the brain of the person from which they were derived. The cortex spheroids grow to a state in which they express functional connectivity, allowing for modeling and understanding of mental illnesses.
- In a not-too-distant future, a patient suffering from mental illness might be able to have his or her cortex grown in a lab, thin sectioned, and analyzed in order to determine where the neural circuity has gone awry.