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Neuroscientist Gavin Clowry didn’t intend to grow a miniature human brain in a rat pup. But a few months ago, that’s essentially what happened. “We were astonished when we saw it,” recalls the faculty member at Newcastle University in the UK.
Clowry and his colleagues had derived human neural stem cells from induced pluripotent stem cells, diffused them into a 3-D gel, and transplanted the gel into the young rats’ brains to test the cells’ ability to survive. A month later, much to the team’s surprise, the human cells had formed columns of tightly packed progenitor cells surrounded by immature neurons. “They looked like organoids,” says Clowry, who published the results in May.
Organoids are tiny collections of tissue made from cells that self-organize into 3-D structures that mimic the anatomy of fully formed organs. Clowry attributes the unexpected development of the human ...
