Lab-grown brain ‘organoids’ set longevity record
Researchers show that brain cells cultured in a dish can mimic normal cerebral development and even retain “memory” of their own histories
In a new milestone for stem cell research, Harvard neuroscientists have set a record for keeping alive lab-grown human brain “organoids” and proven that they mimic key developmental stages seen in living people.
In a paper published this week in Nature, the team reported that these peppercorn-sized clumps of brain cells — each containing more than 1 million cerebral cortex cells derived from human donors — were sustained in the lab for more than five years, three times longer than the previous record. These tiny “avatars” of human brains also retained memories of their own histories and could be manipulated to skip forward to more advanced stages of development — a feature that one day could be exploited to replace diseased cells, or to engineer lab-grown organs.
“We didn’t know how far the development and maturation of human brain tissue could occur outside the context of the normal brain inside the head,” said Paola Arlotta, Golub Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and senior author of the new paper. “This work showed that it’s actually possible to not just have these organoids survive in culture, but also continue to change, develop, and mature over stretches of time that had never been reached before.”
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