Vascularized brain organoids
Scientists have learned how to grow "mini-brains" permeated with a network of vessels
Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science
Back in 2013, Austrian scientists developed a method for growing small three–dimensional structures from human neurons - "organoids" of the brain for biomedical research. Now these technologies have been raised to the next level, forcing the organoid to form its own vascular network and bringing it even closer to the real brain.
Ben Waldau and his colleagues from the University of California at Davis report this in an article published in the journal NeuroReport (Pham et al., Generation of human vascularized brain organoids). According to scientists, in the future such organoids may act as implants to replace lost brain fragments. The presence of a network of vessels allows you to grow larger structures and keep them "in vitro" for longer, and also facilitates their future integration into a living brain.
Waldau and his co-authors obtained neurons from patients undergoing brain surgery and turned them into induced pluripotent stem cells. Then they were forced to develop, differentiating into the progenitor cells of neurons, as well as into the cells of the endothelium, which forms the walls of the vessels of the circulatory and lymphatic systems. After 34 days of separate cultivation, these and other cells were connected and placed in a gel protein base, after which they were grown for another three to five weeks.
A slice of the grown organoid. The arrow indicates the vessel,
sprouted deep into its structure / Pham et al., 2018
During this time, the organoid was finally formed, turning into a "mini-brain", having all the necessary cell types and permeated with a complex network of vessels. According to scientists, the complexity of the resulting structure is comparable to the brain of an embryo in the second trimester of development, although the size is about 3.5 millimeters.
In addition, parallel experiments were conducted, during which "half–ripe" organoids from the precursor cells of neurons and endothelium were cultured not in a protein gel, but in a living organism. To do this, they were surgically implanted into the brains of mice. Two weeks later, scientists checked their condition and found that they had also grown and formed a vascular network.
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