Personalized neuroscience: are human-derived brain organoids the answer?
Imagine a futuristic society capable of curing devastating neurological disorders by recreating patients’ brains in a dish. From Forbes.
Imagine a futuristic society capable of curing devastating neurological disorders by recreating the brains of patients in a dish.
- Miniature 3D structures of neural cells, derived from induced pluripotent stem cells.
- Offer potential for personalized treatments for neurological disorders.
- Tailoring drug cocktails and therapies to individual patients through brain organoids.
- Organoids display electrical activity similar to developing brains, allowing accurate age matching using machine learning algorithms.
Brain organoids are pin-sized three-dimensional self-organizing structures composed of roughly 2.5 million neural cells. They were originally created from human embryonic pluripotent stem cells, cells that are capable of forming every cell in the body. More recent methods are able to generate brain organoids from induced pluripotent stem cells reprogrammed from somatic donor cell types. This means that beginning with terminally differentiated cells, such as skin cells, genetic and cellular reprogramming can be achieved by carefully orchestrated exposure to specific sets of transcription factors and chemical environments. This results in the de-differentiation of the initial (for example, skin) cells back to an embryonic-like pluripotent stem cell state (…)