Researchers Replicate Human Pain in Lab Dish

By Crystal Lindell

Researchers have replicated part of the human nervous system in a lab dish, a method they hope will allow them to study pain and potential treatments without having to inflict pain on humans. 

The research was shared in a study published in Nature, and led by Sergiu Pasca, MD, a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

Pasca and his colleagues used stem cells to recreate the four key neurons involved in the “pain pathway” that processes pain in humans. Specifically, they made sensory neurons, spinal cord neurons, thalamic neurons, and cortical neurons, and put them all together. Then they added capsaicin, which is present in hot chili peppers, to see how the neurons respond to painful stimuli. 

They found that the lab dish neurons will sense the pain through specialized receptors and emit electrical signals throughout the pain pathway, just as they do in humans. 

“That makes us believe that we have actually reconstructed the basic component of this pain circuit,” Pasca explains. 

In a video about the findings, Pasca describes how they did the research and why it matters. 

The findings could allow researchers to study pain in humans in a way that doesn’t cause actual pain to humans or research animals. Human pain has often proven tough to study in laboratory animals.

“Their pain pathways are in some respects different from ours,” Pasca said. “Yet these animals experience pain. Our dish-based construct doesn’t.”

The hope is that being able to reconstruct or to build this pain pathway in the lab will allow researchers to study human genetic disorders and other conditions that cause pain, and then eventually to start testing drugs for alleviating pain. 

“This neural circuit in a dish offers us an exciting way to study disease and to speed up drug discovery and therapeutic applications -- essentially providing us with a working model of a very important part of our human nervous system,” Pasca said.