How Brain Organoids Help Scientists Battle Disease | WIRED Brand Lab

[Narrator] The human brain is complex.

There is a lot we know about it

and there's still a lot left to learn.

But there's only so much we can find out

from traditional ways of studying the brain.

So researchers at Novartis and other organizations

are taking a different approach.

They're growing brain organoids in the lab.

(quirky music)

In the past in order to study neurons,

we had to use neurons from mice or from rats

in order to have the cell type that might

be affected in disease.

However mice and rats don't naturally come down

with schizophrenia or Parkinson's.

And so there's some limitations to

what you can learn from studying rodent neurons.

And so we really need to be able

to study the human brain if we want

to understand the human brain.

[Narrator] But that's easier said than done.

It's been difficult in the past

to acquire human brain tissue.

So the brain is locked within the skull

and so it's very hard to get a biopsy.

And then it's very hard to keep that tissue alive.

[Narrator] But this is all changing

with this scientific breakthrough.

The breakthrough really came from our ability

to use induced pluripotent stem cell technology

to be able to grow an organoid in the lab.

So an organoid is a three dimensional organ

that mimics a three month old human embryonic brain.

That has very similar structure,

where it has a ventricle.

It has these cells which are called progenitor cells,

which give rise to all of the neurons.

It's only a few millimeters in diameter.

And it also cannot think or learn or process information.

It doesn't have sensory input

and so it can't learn or form memories.

Even though these organoids are very young

in development, they still have human neurons.

They still start to form connections

similar to the human brain.

[Narrator] The researchers build the organoids

by taking skin or blood cells from a patient,

reprogramming them into stem cells,

and giving the stem cells cues to coax them

to become neurons which self organize

and connect with each other.

This provides a platform for studying brain diseases

as they've never been studied before.

So the ability to grow human neurons in a dish

now allows us to study the very cell type

that is most affected in disease.

We can study a neuron from a patient that has schizophrenia.

We can study a neuron from a patient

with Parkinson's disease to try to learn

what has gone wrong and try to fix it.

The other very important aspect is that

we can manipulate the system.

So we can use a technology called CRISPR gene editing

in order to remove individual genes

one a time from the organoid.

So we can take a gene that we think might

be implicated in schizophrenia,

remove it, and see how the organoid behaves.

[Narrator] And Novartis is breaking new ground

by scaling up this induced pluripotent stem cell technology.

Researchers at the company are using organoids

to study brain diseases

and discover potential treatments for them.

The work that's being carried out at Novartis

is innovative because we are applying robots

and automation to making organoids.

We can now make hundreds or thousands of organoids.

Scalability allows us to screen

for many, many different drugs.

It's like for looking for the needle in the haystack.

Where we need to screen millions

or tens or millions of compounds.

And so you couldn't do that manually.

We had one project where we wanted

to generate neurons from 47 different people.

Some with schizophrenia, and some without schizophrenia.

And that would've been impossible to do

without having the automation.

[Narrator] Brain organoids may ultimately unlock

new therapies for diseases that have stymied

researchers for decades.

This research approach is very innovative.

It's right at the cutting edge.

I mean we are pushing the limits

of what we can do at Novartis.

It's a renaissance for biology.

It's really a fun place to be

and it's a fun time to be involved in this field.