Brain

Study reveals new evidence of key mechanism in Alzheimer’s

/ Esteban Cortez / 1 Comment

In California, 690,000 people aged 65 and older are living with Alzheimer’s, a degenerative brain disease and the most common form of dementia. In the United States, 5.8 million people aged 65 and older live with Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s affects memory, thinking and behavior and symptoms eventually grow in severity to interfere with daily tasks.  

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s, which is why Rutgers scientists are examining human brain cells in mice to identify a pivotal mechanism that could result in a potential therapy for the disease. In a recent study, the Rutgers team found more clear-cut evidence of how the destructive proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease attack human brain cells and destroy surrounding tissue. 

The researchers studied human brain immune cells injected into the brains of specially bred immunodeficient mice, creating what they called a human-mouse chimera. The researchers detailed what happened to specialized immune brain cells known as microglia after those cells were exposed to tau proteins—destructive substances believed to be involved in Alzheimer’s and other severe human brain diseases. 

“This provided an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the role of human microglia in brains as well as the cognitive impairment seen in Alzheimer’s Disease and Down syndrome, a genetic disorder with a high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease,” said Peng Jiang, an associate professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. 

By studying the process in the newly-developed brain—which allowed human cells to grow, develop and mature with appropriate functions—the scientists were able to witness and analyze a cellular brain attack that has been largely elusive up to this point. 

In autopsies, scientists have been able to study the brains of people who died from Alzheimer’s and have seen residues of tau proteins and cellular changes. The human-mouse brain chimera has allowed the Rutgers team to extract and see human cells in the actual process of deterioration. 

The mice in the study were specially bred to be immunodeficient so that they could receive implanted human cells without rejecting them due to normal immune defenses.  The immunodeficient mice were injected with human microglial cells and, later, with tau proteins, which are linked to the development of the brain disease. 

“Since microglial cells are one of the first cell responders when something goes wrong in the brain, we believe the changes we saw to be significant,” said Mengmeng Jin, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience at Rutgers and first author on the study. 

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) is committed to investing at least $1.5 billion—more than double what CIRM funded between 2006 and 2020—in treatments that target conditions affecting the brain and central nervous system (CNS), including Alzheimer’s. 

Read the source release about the study here.  

“Brains” in a dish that can create electrical impulses

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments
Brain organoids in a petri dish: photo courtesy UCSD

For several years, researchers have been able to take stem cells and use them to make three dimensional structures called organoids. These are a kind of mini organ that scientists can then use to study what happens in the real thing. For example, creating kidney organoids to see how kidney disease develops in patients.

Scientists can do the same with brain cells, creating clumps of cells that become a kind of miniature version of parts of the brain. These organoids can’t do any of the complex things our brains do – such as thinking – but they do serve as useful physical models for us to use in trying to develop a deeper understanding of the brain.

Now Alysson Muotri and his team at UC San Diego – in a study supported by two grants from CIRM – have taken the science one step further, developing brain organoids that allow us to measure the level of electrical activity they generate, and then compare it to the electrical activity seen in the developing brain of a fetus. That last sentence might cause some people to say “What?”, but this is actually really cool science that could help us gain a deeper understanding of how brains develop and come up with new ways to treat problems in the brain caused by faulty circuitry, such as autism or schizophrenia.

The team developed new, more effective methods of growing clusters of the different kinds of cells found in the brain. They then placed them on a multi-electrode array, a kind of muffin tray that could measure electrical impulses. As they fed the cells and increased the number of cells in the trays they were able to measure changes in the electrical impulses they gave off. The cells went from producing 3,000 spikes a minute to 300,000 spikes a minute. This is the first time this level of activity has been achieved in a cell-based laboratory model. But that’s not all.

When they further analyzed the activity of the organoids, they found there were some similarities to the activity seen in the brains of premature babies. For instance, both produced short bursts of activity, followed by a period of inactivity.

Alysson Muotri

In a news release Muotri says they were surprised by the finding:

“We couldn’t believe it at first — we thought our electrodes were malfunctioning. Because the data were so striking, I think many people were kind of skeptical about it, and understandably so.”

Muotri knows that this research – published in the journal Cell Stem Cell – raises ethical issues and he is quick to say that these organoids are nothing like a baby’s brain, that they differ in several critical ways. The organoids are tiny, not just in size but also in the numbers of cells involved. They also don’t have blood vessels to keep them alive or help them grow and they don’t have any ability to think.

“They are far from being functionally equivalent to a full cortex, even in a baby. In fact, we don’t yet have a way to even measure consciousness or sentience.”

What these organoids do have is the ability to help us look at the structure and activity of the brain in ways we never could before. In the past researchers depended on mice or other animals to test new ideas or therapies for human diseases or disorders. Because our brains are so different than animal brains those approaches have had limited results. Just think about how many treatments for Alzheimer’s looked promising in animal models but failed completely in people.

These new organoids allow us to explore how new therapies might work in the human brain, and hopefully increase our ability to develop more effective treatments for conditions as varied as epilepsy and autism.

Salk scientists discover new findings related to the age of organs

/ Yimy Villa / 1 Comment
Dr. Rafael Arrojo e Drigo (left) and Dr. Martin Hetzer (right) at the Salk Institute in San Diego

It has been a long held belief in the scientific community that nerve cells, or possibly the heart, are the oldest cells in the body. This is due to the fact that the brain and heart are the first organs that begin to develop in the womb. Nerve cells have an average lifespan of approximately 80 years without the need of generating new cells. It has been difficult to determine the approximate age of other organs such as the liver and pancreas in the body until now.

Dr. Rafael Arrojo e Drigo and Dr. Martin Hetzer, scientists at the Salk Institute, have discovered a population of cells that reside in the mouse brain, liver, and pancreas that have extremely long lifespans. In some cases, some of these cells were the same age as the animal they were found in. The scientists used a complex labeling and imaging procedure to determine cell age in a mouse model.

Furthermore, the scientists also found that the brain, liver, and pancreas in the mice contain a mixture of “old” and “young” cells, like a mosaic painting composed of small, different colored pieces. They called this phenomenon age mosaicism, referring to the population of identical cells that could only be distinguished by lifespan.

Their method could be applied to other types of tissue in the body, which could provide valuable information, such as the lifelong function of non-dividing cells and how cells lose control over the quality and integrity of important cell structures during aging. The answers to these questions play a key role in understanding ways to prevent the age-related degeneration of organs, such as the brain in Alzheimer’s Disease or the pancreas in Type II Diabetes.

In a press release, Dr. Hetzer is quoted as saying that,

“Determining the age of cells and subcellular structures in adult organisms will provide new insights into cell maintenance and repair mechanisms and the impact of cumulative changes during adulthood on health and development of disease. The ultimate goal is to utilize these mechanisms to prevent or delay age-related decline of organs with limited cell renewal such as the brain, pancreas and heart.”

The full results of the study were published in Cell Metabolism.

You can also see a youtube video below of Dr. Rafael Arrojo e Drigo and Dr. Martin Hetzer discussing their findings.

Why having a wrinkled brain is a good thing

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Brain_01

We normally associate wrinkles with aging, such as wrinkled skin. But there’s one organ that is wrinkled right from the time we are born. It’s our brain. And new research shows those wrinkles are not a sign of age but are, in fact, a sign of just how large and complex our brains are.

The wrinkles, according to U.C. Santa Barbara (UCSB) postdoctoral scholar Eyal Karzbrun, are vital to our development because they create a greater surface area giving our neurons, or brain nerve cells, more space to create connections and deliver information.

In an article in UCSB’s Daily Nexus, Karzbrun says while our knowledge of the brain is increasing there are still many things we don’t understand:

“The brain is a complex organ whose organization is essential to its function. Yet it is ‘assembled by itself’. How this assembly takes place and what physics come into play is fundamental to our understanding of the brain.”

Eyal Karzbrun

Eyal Karzbrun: Photo courtesy UCSB

Karzbrun used stem cells to create 3D clusters of brain cells, to better understand how they organize themselves. He said brains are like computers in the way they rely on surface area to process information.

“In order to be computationally strong and quick, what your brain does is take a lot of surface area and put it in a small volume. The cerebral cortex, which occupies most of the volume in your brain, has a unique architecture in which neurons are layered on the outer surface of the brain, and the bulk of the brain is composed of axons, [or] biological wire which interconnect the neurons.”

Karzbrun says gaining a deeper understanding of how the brain is formed, and why it takes the shape it does, may help us develop new approaches to treating problems in the brain.

 

Stem Cell Roundup: watching brain cells in real time, building better heart cells, and the plot thickens on the adult neurogenesis debate

/ Karen Ring / 2 Comments

Here are the stem cell stories that caught our eye this week.

Watching brain cells in real time

This illustration depicts a new method that enables scientists to see an astrocyte (green) physically interacting with a neuronal synapse (red) in real time, and producing an optical signal (yellow). (Khakh Lab, UCLA Health)

Our stem cell photo of the week is brought to you by the Khakh lab at UCLA Health. The lab developed a new method that allows scientists to watch brain cells interact in real time. Using a technique called fluorescence resonance energy-transfer (FRET) microscopy, the team can visualize how astrocytes (key support cells in our central nervous system) and brain cells called neurons form connections in the mouse brain and how these connections are affected by diseases like Alzheimer’s and ALS.

Baljit Khakh, the study’s first author, explained the importance of their findings in a news release:

“This new tool makes possible experiments that we have been wanting to perform for many years. For example, we can now observe how brain damage alters the way that astrocytes interact with neurons and develop strategies to address these changes.”

The study was published this week in the journal Neuron.

Turn up the power: How to build a better heart cell (Todd Dubnicoff)

For years now, researchers have had the know-how to reprogram a donor’s skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and then specialize them into heart muscle cells called cardiomyocytes. The intervening years have focused on optimizing this method to accurately model the biology of the adult human heart as a means to test drug toxicity and ultimately develop therapies for heart disease. Reporting this week in Nature, scientists at Columbia University report an important step toward those goals.

The muscle contractions of a beating heart occur through natural electrical impulses generated by pacemaker cells. In the case of lab-grown cardiomyocytes, introducing mechanical and electrical stimulation is required to reliably generate these cells. In the current study, the research team showed that the timing and amount of stimulation is a critical aspect to the procedure.

The iPS-derived cardiomyocytes have formed heart tissue that closely mimics human heart functionality at over four weeks of maturation. Credit: Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic/Columbia University.

The team tested three scenarios on iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes (iPSC-CMs): no electrical stimulation for 3 weeks, constant stimulation for 3 weeks, and finally, two weeks of increasingly higher stimulation followed by a week of constant stimulation. This third setup mimics the changes that occur in a baby’s heart just before and just after birth.

These scenarios were tested in 12 day-old and 28 day-old iPSC-CMs. The results show that only the 12 day-old cells subjected to the increasing amounts of stimulation gave rise to fully mature heart muscle cells. On top of that, it only took four weeks to make those cells. Seila Selimovic, Ph.D., an expert at the National Institutes of Health who was not involved in the study, explained the importance of these findings in a press release:

“The resulting engineered tissue is truly unprecedented in its similarity to functioning human tissue. The ability to develop mature cardiac tissue in such a short time is an important step in moving us closer to having reliable human tissue models for drug testing.”

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-04-early-bioengineered-human-heart-cells.html#jCp

Yes we do, no we don’t. More confusion over growing new brain cells as we grow older (Kevin McCormack)

First we didn’t, then we did, then we didn’t again, now we do again. Or maybe we do again.

The debate over whether we are able to continue making new neurons as we get older took another twist this week. Scientists at Columbia University said their research shows we do make new neurons in our brain, even as we age.

This image shows what scientists say is a new neuron in the brain of an older human. A new study suggests that humans continue to make new neurons throughout their lives. (Columbia University Irving Medical Center)

In the study, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the researchers examined the brains of 28 deceased donors aged 14 to 79. They found similar numbers of precursor and immature neurons in all the brains, suggesting we continue to develop new brain cells as we age.

This contrasts with a UCSF study published just last month which came to the opposite conclusion, that there was no evidence we make new brain cells as we age.

In an interview in the LA Times, Dr. Maura Boldrini, the lead author on the new study, says they looked at a whole section of the brain rather than the thin tissues slices the UCSF team used:

“In science, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If you can’t find something it doesn’t mean that it is not there 100%.”

Well, that resolves that debate. At least until the next study.

Stanford Scientist Sergiu Pasca Receives Prestigious Vilcek Prize for Stem Cell Research on Neuropsychiatric Disorders

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

Sergiu Pasca, Stanford University

Last month, we blogged about Stanford neuroscientist Sergiu Pasca and his interesting research using stem cells to model the human brain in 3D. This month we bring you an exciting update about Dr. Pasca and his work.

On February 1st, Pasca was awarded one of the 2018 Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science. The Vilcek Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness of the important contributions made by immigrants to American arts and sciences.

Pasca was born in Romania and got his medical degree there before moving to the US to pursue research at Stanford University in 2009. He is now an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and has dedicated his lab’s research to understanding human brain development and neuropsychiatric disorders using 3D brain organoid cultures derived from pluripotent stem cells.

The Vilcek Foundation produced a fascinating video (below) featuring Pasca’s life journey and his current CIRM-funded research on Timothy Syndrome – a rare form of autism. In the video, Pasca describes how his lab’s insights into this rare psychiatric disorder will hopefully shed light on other neurological diseases. He shares his hope that his research will yield something that translates to the clinic.

The Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science comes with a $50,000 cash award. Pasca along with the other prize winners will be honored at a gala event in New York City in April 2018.

You can read more about Pasca’s prize winning research on the Vilcek website and in past CIRM blogs below.

Related Links:

Modeling the Human Brain in 3D

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

(Image from Pasca Lab, Stanford University)

Can you guess what the tiny white balls are in this photo? I’ll give you a hint, they represent the organ that you’re using right now to answer my question.

These are 3D brain organoids generated from human pluripotent stem cells growing in a culture dish. You can think of them as miniature models of the human brain, containing many of the brain’s various cell types, structures, and regions.

Scientists are using brain organoids to study the development of the human nervous system and also to model neurological diseases and psychiatric disorders. These structures allow scientists to dissect the inner workings of the brain – something they can’t do with living patients.

Brain-in-a-Dish

Dr. Sergiu Pasca is a professor at Stanford University who is using 3D cultures to understand human brain development. Pasca and his lab have previously published methods to make different types of brain organoids from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) that recapitulate human brain developmental events in a dish.

Sergiu Pasca, Stanford University (Image credit: Steve Fisch)

My colleague, Todd Dubnicoff, blogged about Pasca’s research last year:

“Using brain tissue grown from patient-derived iPSCs, Dr. Sergiu Pasca and his team recreated the types of nerve cell circuits that form during the late stages of pregnancy in the fetal cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain that is responsible for functions including memory, language and emotion. With this system, they observed irregularities in the assembly of brain circuitry that provide new insights into the cellular and molecular causes of neuropsychiatric disorders like autism.”

Pasca generated brain organoids from the iPSCs of patients with a genetic disease called Timothy Syndrome – a condition that causes heart problems and some symptoms of autism spectrum disorder in children. By comparing the nerve cell circuits in patient versus healthy brain organoids, he observed a disruption in the migration of nerve cells in the organoids derived from Timothy Syndrome iPSCs.

“We’ve never been able to recapitulate these human-brain developmental events in a dish before,” said Pasca in a press release, “the process happens in the second half of pregnancy, so viewing it live is challenging. Our method lets us see the entire movie, not just snapshots.”

The Rise of 3D Brain Cultures

Pasca’s lab is just one of many that are working with 3D brain culture technologies to study human development and disease. These technologies are rising in popularity amongst scientists because they make it possible to study human brain tissue in normal and abnormal conditions. Brain organoids have also appeared in the mainstream news as novel tools to study how epidemics like the Zika virus outbreak affect the developing fetal brain (more here and here).

While these advances are exciting and promising, the field is still in its early stages and the 3D organoid models are far from perfect at representing the complex biology of the human brain.

Pasca addresses the progress and the hurdles of 3D brain cultures in a review article titled “The rise of three-dimensional brain cultures” published this week in the journal Nature. The article, describes in detail how pluripotent stem cells can assemble into structures that represent different regions of the human brain allowing scientists to observe how cells interact within neural circuits and how these circuits are disrupted by disease.

The review goes on to compare different approaches for creating 3D brain cultures (see figure below) and their different applications. For instance, scientists are culturing organoids on microchips (brains-on-a-chip) to model the blood-brain barrier – the membrane structure that protects the brain from circulating pathogens in the blood but also makes drug delivery to brain very challenging. Brain organoids are also being used to screen for new drugs and to model complex diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Human pluripotent stem cells, adult stem cells or cancer cells  can be used to derive microfluidics-based organs-on-a-chip (top), undirected organoids (middle), and region-specific brain organoids or organ spheroids (bottom). These 3D cultures can be manipulated with CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing technologies, transplanted into animals or used for drug screening. (Pasca, Nature)

Pasca ends the review by identifying the major hurdles facing 3D brain culture technologies. He argues that “3D cultures only approximate the appearance and architecture of neural tissue” and that the cells and structures within these organoids are not always predictable. These issues can be address over time by enforcing quality control in how these 3D cultures are made and by using new biomaterials that enable the expansion and maturation of these cultures.

Nonetheless, Pasca believes that 3D brain cultures combined with advancing technologies to study them have “the potential to give rise to novel features for studying human brain development and disease.”

He concludes the review with a cautiously optimistic outlook:

“This is an exciting new field and as with many technologies, it may follow a ‘hype’ cycle in which we overestimate its effects in the short run and underestimate its effects in the long run. A better understanding of the complexity of this platform, and bringing interdisciplinary approaches will accelerate our progress up a ‘slope of enlightenment’ and into the ‘plateau of productivity’.”

3D brain culture from the Pasca Lab, Stanford University

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Stem cell stories that caught our eye: brains, brains and more brains!

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

This week we bring you three separate stories about the brain. Two are exciting new advances that use stem cells to understand the brain and the third is plain creepy.

Bioengineering better brains. Lab grown mini-brains got an upgrade thanks to a study published this week in Nature Biotechnology. Mini-brains are tiny 3D organs that harbor similar cell types and structures found in the human brain. They are made from pluripotent stem cells cultured in laboratory bioreactors that allow these cells to mature into brain tissue in the span of a month.

The brain organoid technology was first published back in 2013 by Austrian scientists Jürgen Knoblich and Madeline Lancaster. They used mini-brains to study human brain development and a model a birth defect called microcephaly, which causes abnormally small heads in babies. Mini-brains filled a void for scientists desperate for better, more relevant models of human brain development. But the technology had issues with consistency and produced organoids that varied in size, structure and cell type.

Cross-section of a mini-brain. (Madeline Lancaster/MRC-LMB)

Fast forward four years and the same team of scientists has improved upon their original method by adding a bioengineering technique that will generate more consistent mini-brains. Instead of relying on the stem cells to organize themselves into the proper structures in the brain, the team developed a biological scaffold made of microfilaments that guides the growth and development of stem cells into organoids. They called these “engineered cerebral organoids” or enCORs for short.

In a news feature on IMBA, Jürgen Knoblich explained that enCORs are more reproducible and representative of the brain’s architecture, thus making them more effective models for neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders.

“An important hallmark of the bioengineered organoids is their increased surface to volume ratio. Because of their improved tissue architecture, enCORs can allow for the study of a broader array of neurological diseases where neuronal positioning is thought to be affected, including lissencephaly (smooth brain), epilepsy, and even autism and schizophrenia.”

Salk team finds genetic links between brain’s immune cells and neurological disorders. (Todd Dubnicoff)

Dysfunction of brain cells called microglia have been implicated in a wide range of neurologic disorders like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, autism and schizophrenia. But a detailed examination of these cells has proved difficult because they don’t grow well in lab dishes. And attempts to grow microglia from stem cells is hampered by the fact that the cell type hasn’t been characterized enough for researchers to know how to distinguish it from related cell types found in the blood.

By performing an extensive analysis of microglia gene activity, Salk Institute scientists have now pinpointed genetic links between these cells and neurological disease. These discoveries also demonstrate the importance of the microglia’s environment within the brain to maintain its identity. The study results were reported in Science.

Microglia are important immune cells in the brain. They are related to macrophages which are white blood cells that roam through the body via the circulatory system and gobble up damaged or dying cells as well as foreign invaders. Microglia also perform those duties in the brain and use their eating function to trim away faulty or damage nerve connections.

To study a direct source of microglia, the team worked with neurosurgeons to obtain small samples of brain tissue from patients undergoing surgery for epilepsy, a tumor or stroke. Microglia were isolated from healthy regions of brain tissue that were incidentally removed along with damaged or diseased brain tissue.

Salk and UC San Diego scientists conducted a vast survey of microglia (pictured here), revealing links to neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric illnesses. (Image: Nicole Coufal)

A portion of the isolated microglia were immediately processed to take a snap shot of gene activity. The researchers found that hundreds of genes in the microglia had much higher activities compared to those same genes in macrophages. But when the microglia were transferred to petri dishes, gene activity in general dropped. In fact, within six hours of tissue collection, the activity of over 2000 genes in the cells had dropped significantly. This result suggests the microglial rely on signals in the brain to stimulate their gene activity and may explain why they don’t grow well once removed from that environment into lab dishes.

Of the hundreds of genes whose activity were boosted in microglia, the researchers tracked down several that were linked to several neurological disorders. Dr. Nicole Coufal summarized these results and their implications in a Salk press release:

“A really high proportion of genes linked to multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and schizophrenia are much more highly expressed in microglia than the rest of the brain. That suggests there’s some kind of link between microglia and the diseases.”

Future studies are needed to explain the exact nature of this link. But with these molecular descriptions of microglia gene activity now in hand, the researchers are in a better position to study microglia’s role in disease.

A stem cell trial to bring back the dead, brain-dead that is. A somewhat creepy stem cell story resurfaced in the news this week. A company called Bioquark in Philadelphia is attempting to bring brain-dead patients back to life by injecting adult stem cells into their spinal cords in combination with other treatments that include protein blend injections, electrical nerve stimulation and laser therapy. The hope is that this combination stem cell therapy will generate new neurons that can reestablish lost connections in the brain and bring it back to life.

Abstract image of a neuron. (Dom Smith/STAT)

You might wonder why the company is trying multiple different treatments simultaneously. In a conversation with STAT news, Bioquark CEO Ira Pastor explained,

“It’s our contention that there’s no single magic bullet for this, so to start with a single magic bullet makes no sense. Hence why we have to take a different approach.”

Bioquark is planning to relaunch a clinical trial testing its combination therapy in Latin America sometime this year. The company previously attempted to launch its first trial in India back in April of 2016, but it never got off the ground because it failed to get clearance from India’s Drug Controller General.

STATnews staff writer Kate Sheridan called the trial “controversial” and raised questions about how it would impact patients and their families.

“How do researchers complete trial paperwork when the person participating is, legally, dead? If the person did regain brain activity, what kind of functional abilities would he or she have? Are families getting their hopes up for an incredibly long-shot cure?”

Scientists also have questions mainly about whether this treatment will actually work or is just a shot in the dark. Adding to the uncertainty is the fact that Bioquark has no preclinical evidence that its combination treatment is effective in animal models. The STAT piece details how the treatments have been tested individually for other conditions such as stroke and coma, but not in brain-dead patients. To further complicate things, there is no consensus on how to define brain death in patients, so patient improvements observed during the trial could be unrelated to the treatment.

STAT asked expert doctors in the field whether Bioquark’s strategy was feasible. Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Ed Cooper said that there’s no way electric stimulation would work, pointing out that the technique requires a functioning brain stem which brain-dead patients don’t have. Pediatric surgeon Dr. Charles Cox, who works on a stem cell treatment for traumatic brain injury and is unrelated to Bioquark, commented, “it’s not the absolute craziest thing I’ve ever heard, but I think the probability of that working is next to zero.”

But Pastor seems immune to the skepticism and naysayers.

“I give us a pretty good chance. I just think it’s a matter of putting it all together and getting the right people and the right minds on it.”

Rhythmic brain circuits built from stem cells

/ Todd Dubnicoff / Leave a comment

The TV commercial is nearly 20 years old but I remember it vividly: a couple is driving down a street when they suddenly realize the music on their tape deck is in sync with the repetitive activity on the street. From the guy casually dribbling a basketball to people walking along the sidewalk to the delivery people passing packages out of their truck, everything and everyone is moving rhythmically to the beat.

The ending tag line was, “Sometimes things just come together,” which is quite true. Many of our basic daily activities like breathing and walking just come together as a result of repetitive movement. It’s easy to take them for granted but those rhythmic patterns ultimately rely on very intricate, interconnected signals between nerve cells, also called neurons, in the brain and spinal cord.

Circuitoids: a neural network in a lab dish

A CIRM-funded study published yesterday in eLife by Salk Institute scientists reports on a method to mimic these repetitive signals in a lab dish using neurons grown from embryonic stem cells. This novel cell circuitry system gives the researchers a tool for gaining new insights into neurodegenerative diseases, like Parkinson’s and ALS, and may even provide a means to fix neurons damaged by injury or disease.

The researchers changed or specialized mouse embryonic stem cells into neurons that either stimulate nerve signals, called excitatory neurons, or neurons that block nerve signals, called inhibitory neurons. Growing these groups of cells together led to spontaneous rhythmic nerve signals. These clumps of cells containing about 50,000 neurons each were dubbed circuitoids by the team.

pfaff-circutoid-cropped

Confocal microscope immunofluorescent image of a spinal cord neural circuit made entirely from stem cells and termed a “circuitoid.” Credit: Salk Institute.

Making neural networks dance to a different beat

A video produced by the Salk Institute (see below), shows some fascinating microscopy visualizations of these circuitoids’ repetitive signals. In the video, team leader Samuel Pfaff explains that changing the ratio of excitatory vs inhibitory neurons had noticeable effects on the rhythm of the nerve impulses:

“What we were able to do is combine different ratios of cell types and study properties of the rhythmicity of the circuitoid. And that rhythmicity could be very tightly control depending on the cellular composition of the neural networks that we were forming. So we could regulate the speed [of the rhythmicity] which is kind of equivalent to how fast you’re walking.”

It’s possible that the actual neural networks in our brains have the flexibility to vary the ratio of the active excitatory to inhibitory neurons as a way to allow adjustments in the body’s repetitive movements. But the complexity of those networks in the human brain are staggering which is why these circuitoids could help:

Samuel Pfaff. (Salk Institute)

Samuel Pfaff. (Salk Institute)

“It’s still very difficult to contemplate how large groups of neurons with literally billions if not trillions of connections take information and process it,” says Pfaff in a press release. “But we think that developing this kind of simple circuitry in a dish will allow us to extract some of the principles of how real brain circuits operate. With that basic information maybe we can begin to understand how things go awry in disease.”

Stories that caught our eye: stem cell transplants help put MS in remission; unlocking the cause of autism; and a day to discover what stem cells are all about

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

multiple-sclerosis

Motor neurons

Stem cell transplants help put MS in remission: A combination of high dose immunosuppressive therapy and transplant of a person’s own blood stem cells seems to be a powerful tool in helping people with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) go into sustained remission.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disorder where the body’s own immune system attacks the brain and spinal cord, causing a wide variety of symptoms including overwhelming fatigue, blurred vision and mobility problems. RRMS is the most common form of MS, affecting up to 85 percent of people, and is characterized by attacks followed by periods of remission.

The HALT-MS trial, which was sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), took the patient’s own blood stem cells, gave the individual chemotherapy to deplete their immune system, then returned the blood stem cells to the patient. The stem cells created a new blood supply and seemed to help repair the immune system.

Five years after the treatment, most of the patients were still in remission, despite not taking any medications for MS. Some people even recovered some mobility or other capabilities that they had lost due to the disease.

In a news release, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID, said anything that holds the disease at bay and helps people avoid taking medications is important:

“These extended findings suggest that one-time treatment with HDIT/HCT may be substantially more effective than long-term treatment with the best available medications for people with a certain type of MS. These encouraging results support the development of a large, randomized trial to directly compare HDIT/HCT to standard of care for this often-debilitating disease.”

scripps-campus

Scripps Research Institute

Using stem cells to model brain development disorders. (Karen Ring) CIRM-funded scientists from the Scripps Research Institute are interested in understanding how the brain develops and what goes wrong to cause intellectual disabilities like Fragile X syndrome, a genetic disease that is a common cause of autism spectrum disorder.

Because studying developmental disorders in humans is very difficult, the Scripps team turned to stem cell models for answers. This week, in the journal Brain, they published a breakthrough in our understanding of the early stages of brain development. They took induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), made from cells from Fragile X syndrome patients, and turned these cells into brain cells called neurons in a cell culture dish.

They noticed an obvious difference between Fragile X patient iPSCs and healthy iPSCs: the patient stem cells took longer to develop into neurons, a result that suggests a similar delay in fetal brain development. The neurons from Fragile X patients also had difficulty forming synaptic connections, which are bridges that allow for information to pass from one neuron to another.

Scripps Research professor Jeanne Loring said that their findings could help to identify new drug therapies to treat Fragile X syndrome. She explained in a press release;

“We’re the first to see that these changes happen very early in brain development. This may be the only way we’ll be able to identify possible drug treatments to minimize the effects of the disorder.”

Looking ahead, Loring and her team will apply their stem cell model to other developmental diseases. She said, “Now we have the tools to ask the questions to advance people’s health.”

A Day to Discover What Stem Cells Are All about.  (Karen Ring) Everyone is familiar with the word stem cells, but do they really know what these cells are and what they are capable of? Scientists are finding creative ways to educate the public and students about the power of stem cells and stem cell research. A great example is the University of Southern California (USC), which is hosting a Stem Cell Day of Discovery to educate middle and high school students and their families about stem cell research.

The event is this Saturday at the USC Health Sciences Campus and will feature science talks, lab tours, hands-on experiments, stem cell lab video games, and a resource fair. It’s a wonderful opportunity for families to engage in science and also to expose young students to science in a fun and engaging way.

Interest in Stem Cell Day has been so high that the event has already sold out. But don’t worry, there will be another stem cell day next year. And for those of you who don’t live in Southern California, mark your calendars for the 2017 Stem Cell Awareness Day on Wednesday, October 11th. There will be stem cell education events all over California and in other parts of the country during that week in honor of this important day.