Develop miniature avatars of the pancreas or bladder to better understand and treat diseases; This insight may seem from the realm of fiction, but it is very real and is being studied by scholars from all over the world.
At the Institut Pasteur in Paris, the team of researcher Mireia Riquette, head of Molecular Mechanisms in the Pathological Aging Laboratory, devotes its time to producing tiny brains, or more precisely brain organelles.
Since research began at the end of 2020, thousands of these organisms have emerged; Hundreds of them are still alive in bio fermentation.
Tiny white balls
To the naked eye, this appears in the form of tiny white balls kept at 37°C in Petri cans (test dishes), which in turn are kept in a constant motion that allows the necessary nutrients to be transported and to avoid the aggregation of these organisms with one another.
Here it must be noted that after fertilization of the egg in nature, the so-called pluripotent stem cells appear quickly, which have the ability to produce all types of cells in the human body, from nerve cells, skin cells, etc.
However, less than 20 years ago, Japanese researcher Shinya Yamanaka (who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2012) succeeded - less than 20 years ago - in developing a method that makes it possible to reprogram specialized adult cells in the laboratory (such as liver, neurons, etc.), so that they can once Others produce all types of cells.
Stem Cells
These "induced pluripotent stem cells" - called iPS for short - constituted a turning point in the history of human biology. This allowed for a lot of new research.
Specifically from pluripotent stem cells, the Pasteur Institute team is working - based on protocols developed by various laboratories - to generate organoids in the brain; This makes it possible to obtain within a few months organized cells of a size of 3 or 4 millimeters.
Space memberships
"It's something much simpler than the human cerebral cortex, but these organelles are made up of different types of cells, and they interact with each other, forming layers that are properly centered," says Mireia Ricchetti. In all, this gives "a three-dimensional structure, very close to the brain of a 20-week-old human".
This is one of the keys to understanding the benefit of this revolutionary technology. Organisms are changing the way cells are studied, while most research is currently being done on two-dimensional cells.
However, the complexity of human biology cannot always be understood in two dimensions and in one type of cell. "Some drugs will work on two-dimensional cells, and then we realize that they do not work on three-dimensional cells," stresses the researcher at the Pasteur Institute.
Therefore, the use of these miniature organs offers new possibilities for a better understanding of disease stages, the action of the drug molecule, and its potential toxicity. This is also consistent with the desire to reduce the use of animal testing.
More broadly, for Miria Rickett's team, these organisms make it possible to study diseased human brain load. This could open up the possibility of working on all kinds of degenerative diseases.
Memberships offer a revolutionary
Organoids are a revolutionary advance that is not only used by the Pasteur Institute, and laboratories from all over the world are involved in the research, and human "micro organs" have already been created from the colon, prostate, lung, breast and pancreas.
An international study - published on Wednesday in the scientific journal Nature - showed a special interest in transplanting organoids from human brains into the cortex of young mice, with the aim of studying mental illness.
And by next year, pseudo-organoids from the Pasteur Institute will be sent to the International Space Station, in order to determine the molecular-level effects of life in space on human brain cells upon return to Earth.
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