Scientists have used living human brain tissue to mimic the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, which will speed up hunting treatments.

In a world, a British team has successfully exposed healthy brain tissue from living NHS patients to a toxic form of Alzheimer's-related protein, captured from patients who died of the disease, to show how it damages the connection between brain cells in real time.

The groundbreaking move provides a rare and powerful opportunity to see the development of dementia in human brain cells. Experts say new ways to study the disease can make testing new drugs easier and increase the chances of finding effective drugs.

Dementia poses a huge threat to global health and social care systems. The number of affected people is expected to triple to nearly 153 million by 2050, highlighting why finding new ways to study the disease and speed up treatments is a health focus.

In this study, Edinburgh scientists and neurosurgeons demonstrate for the first time how the toxic form of Alzheimer's amyloid beta protein sticks to and destroys important links between brain cells.

Tiny fragments of healthy brain tissue were collected from cancer patients when they performed routine surgery to remove tumors from the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.

Scientists wearing scrubs are stationed in the operating theater with the surgical team, ready to receive healthy brain tissue that would otherwise be discarded.

Once the brain fragments were retrieved, the scientists placed them in a glass bottle filled with oxidized artificial spinal fluid and then jumped into a taxi to transport the samples to their lab for a few minutes.

“We almost ran back to the lab,” said Dr. Claire Durrant, a competition with dementia researcher and the UK Institute of Dementia, an emerging leader at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Discovery Brain Science.

There, the samples are sliced ​​thinly, less than a third of the thickness of the millimeters and arranged in side dishes. Each living brain tissue is kept in a nutrient-rich liquid in an incubator at 37°C to simulate body temperature. “Then we started experimenting almost immediately,” Durant said.

With the patient's permission, fragments of the human brain remain vibrant in the dish for up to two weeks.

The researchers extracted a toxic form of amyloid beta from people who died of Alzheimer's disease and then applied it to healthy living brain tissue in their dishes. "We are trying to imitate Alzheimer's disease," Durant said.

Her team found that when exposed to normal forms of protein, the brain did not try to repair the damage caused by the toxic form of amyloid beta.

Even the natural levels of amyloid beta are small changes (increased or decreased) enough to destroy brain cells. Durant said this suggests that the brain needs a finely adjusted optimal position of proteins to function properly.

“Working with the neurosurgery team at the University of Edinburgh, we have shown that living human brain slices can be used to explore fundamental issues related to Alzheimer’s disease,” she said.

“We believe that the tool can help accelerate laboratory discoveries to patients and bring us closer to a world without dementia.”

This breakthrough will allow scientists to prevent synaptic loss with the greatest opportunity - a connection that allows information flow between brain cells and is crucial to healthy brain function. Alzheimer's disease attack synapses and their losses strongly predict decreased memory and thinking ability.

Durrant's team also found that the brain section taken from the temporal lobe is the temporal lobe, an area known to be affected early in Alzheimer's, releasing higher levels of tau, another key disease protein.

This could explain why this part of the brain is particularly vulnerable in the early stages of Alzheimer's, as the increased release of tau may allow the toxic form of the protein to spread more quickly between cells.

The study was awarded a charity Race to Race dementia, founded after the dementia diagnosis of Sir Jackie Stewart Sir's wife, and a donation of £1 million by the James Dyson Foundation, a charity that supports medical research and engineering education.

Dyson said the breakthrough represents “an advancement to solve one of the most destructive problems of our time.”

"Collection of human brain samples of life with brain surgeons and their consent patients and keeping them alive in the lab is a groundbreaking approach," he said. "It allows researchers to better examine Alzheimer's disease on real human brain cells rather than relying on animal substitutes, such as mice."

Professor Tara Spire-Jones, the head of the British Institute of Dementia, praised the important developments. She said seeing Alzheimer's early days in real time provides scientists with a new tool to better understand the disease and how it can be treated.

"The use of human tissue samples that are generously donating to clear brain tumors allows scientists to explore the response of the living human brain to the toxic proteins produced in Alzheimer's disease, which will allow testing for whether new treatments are effective in the future," she said.