Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

you can make this four-part, we call it the sensory assembloid, or somatosensory assembloid, because it turns out that the sensory neurons that we can make are mostly sensory neurons that sense pain stimuli.

And so you can actually put the four parts together, so the sensory, the spinal cord, the thalamus, and the cortex, and you have to put them in that order.

If you change the order, the cells will not find each other.

So you just have to create the minimal conditions for them, making the right cell types, putting them in the right order, and then they'll find each other.

And within a few weeks, so it takes hundreds of days to build a circuit like this.

But the beauty of it is that suddenly you look at it and you just see spontaneous activity that arises in the entire pathway.

It just starts to flicker all in sync.

Yes.

So that is certainly one potential.

The other thing that you can do, and the first application that we've had was for genetic forms of pain conditions.

So we very often think that genetic conditions where you have a very clear cause, so like entry points, like Rosetta stones for understanding anything.

So there are these interesting mutations in a sodium channel, so another channel,

But the sodium channel turns out that if the channel is overactive because of a mutation, you'll have excessive pain.

So these patients are highly sensitive.

But then if the channel is essentially unable to function, then these patients have loss of pain.

And that's equally bad.

Many of these patients actually will die because they can't sense pain at all.

No, no, no.

And it's absolutely true.

Like feedback in general is very important, including through like this painful stimuli, through all stimuli in general.