Humans have used psychedelic drugs for hundreds of years, but we still don’t know an awful lot about what LSD, MDMA, DMT, psilocybin, and the whole galaxy of other psychedelic drugs do to our brains. That’s because it’s really hard — and really illegal — to lick toads. It’s also illegal to smoke DMT inside a fMRI machine. Fortunately, scientists have found a way around that problem: Now they can use mini-brains — known more formally as “organoids” — that can show us what happens in real time without having to get anyone high.
In a study published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports, a team of Brazilian scientists dosed mini-brains with 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), a chemical similar to DMT that’s secreted by Incilius alvarius toads. They found that a single 24-hour treatment with 5-MeO-DMT downregulated pathways that are associated with inflammation and substance-use disorders, and they also observed how the psychedelic drug creates cellular changes in the brain.
Beyond their actual findings, this research represents an important step for organoid research on drugs.
“For the first time we could describe psychedelic related changes in the molecular functioning of human neural tissue”, says Stevens Rehen, study leader and a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Head of Research at D’Or Institute for Research and Education.
In the 5-MeO-DMT study, scientists used cerebral organoids to explore how the drug affects protein expression which governs brain plasticity and inflammation, among other things. They found that the drug didn’t have any effects on cell growth or death, but they did find that organoid cells express 5-MeO-DMT receptors, meaning that these lab-grown mini-brains seem to be appropriate platforms for testing DMT-type drugs.
A major weakness of this study is that organoids don’t contain all the different areas of an actual human brain. Therefore, scientists using organoids to study the effects of drugs on the brain can’t see all the complex interactions that typically occur among brain regions when a person uses psychedelic drugs. But this research does provide important first steps as scientists explore why psychedelics like 5-MeO-DMT seem to help protect people’s brains from neurodegeneration.
From:
inverse.com
