The development of a 3-D brain organoid that contains all six of the major cell types found in adult human brain cortex will be the featured topic of a presentation at the Young Research Forum of the International Conference on Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders in New York on Oct. 20.
Goodwell Nzou, a doctoral student at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, N.C., will give the presentation, titled “The development of a multicellular three dimensional neurovascular unit model with a functional blood-brain barrier” at 1:45 p.m.
In the study that Mr. Nzou and his colleagues at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine published in May in Scientific Reports, they noted that, in addition to the model’s use of all six of the major cell types found in adult human brain cortex (human brain microvascular endothelial cells, pericytes, astrocytes, microglia, oligodendrocytes, and neurons), they found that it also promotes the formation of a blood-brain barrier that mimics normal human anatomy.
The researchers said their 3-D in vitro system could have potential applications in drug discovery, toxicity screening, and disease modeling for neurologic diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. They demonstrated the model’s use in toxicity assessment studies for molecules that have the potential to cross or open the blood-brain barrier and also reported establishing a model of the blood-brain barrier during clinical ischemia “showing physiologic responses under hypoxic conditions.”