Chimeric Brain "Organoids" Offer New Insights into Brain Function and Development

AUSTIN, Texas - Sept. 25, 2024 - PRLog -- Today's laboratory researchers benefit from a growing number of available models for understanding diseases and potential corresponding clinical therapies to treat or eradicate them.

Once there were only a few choices: either studying diseases 'in vivo' (meaning in live human or animal test subjects) or 'in vitro' e.g. studying cell lines grown in the lab.

Today, we have two more important options.

The first is the availability of digital disease models – based on our growing knowledge of the human genome, which has grown tremendously in recent years due to new AI-generated insights, such as AlphaFold's predictive protein modeling.

The second is the development of laboratory techniques to harvest cells and grow them in the laboratory to create cell colonies that exhibit organ-like qualities.

These so-called "organoids" are an important scientific breakthrough for a couple of reasons.

First, in many cases, they offer a viable alternative to testing medicines and other products (such as cosmetics) on animals, which many consider unnecessarily cruel.

Second, organoids can offer research scientists a more realistic testing environment than traditional simple cell lines in a petri dish.

The complex structure of organoids, typically formed from different types of cells, provides a more robust research model to test potential clinical therapies and gain insight into the underlying causes of disease than say a single line of cancer cells grown by itself in the laboratory.

3D Printing Used to Create Organoid Structures in the Laboratory

How do laboratory researchers grow organoids in the lab?

Cells are taken from the human or animal host; these are typically a combination of one or more of embryonic stem cells (ESCs), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), or neonatal or adult stem cells (ASCs).

ESCs and iPSCs are especially useful for understanding early-stage embryonic development. To "grow" these types of organoids in the laboratory, researchers use different growth factors and inhibitors to simulate the same type of living development cues that occur naturally.

ASC-based organoids are created by collecting postnatal or adult tissues containing adult stem cells. These are "grown" by applying growth factors that replicate the regulation signals that occur during normal cell growth.

Researchers rely on a couple of different techniques to assist the organoids in creating a three-dimensional structure.

For example, organoids can be grown "scaffold-free" meaning without a supporting structure by letting groups of cells cling to the underside of a surface, allowing a combination of gravity and surface tension to provide a structure for them to grow.

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