A HUMAN BRAIN MICROPHYSIOLOGICAL SYSTEM FOR THE STUDY OF PARKINSON’S DISEASE

The potential for brain organoids to replace and complement animal models in toxicological research has become, since the advent of induced pluripotent stem cells, far more plausible. One of the main obstacles on this path is the challenge of recapitulating human physiology in a microphysiological system that remains consistently healthy at its core as well as on its surface, and can be produced in abundance without compromising uniformity of structure, size, and shape. Using a relatively simple, easily reproducible model, we have begun to test the response of such brain organoids to toxicants associated with Parkinson’s disease, and to gauge the effectiveness of drugs thought to potentially mitigate parkinsonism, in an effort to investigate mechanisms underlying this important medical condition, and just as importantly, to demonstrate our model’s potential for advancing the progress of in vitro alternatives to animal studies. Our results show negative data that may prove useful in designing future toxicological experiments. Since we are using human cells, rather than, for example, mouse or rat cells, and since our methods may be more humane than experiments performed with these animals, efforts in this direction seem especially justified, if only for the potential long-term gains of establishing alternatives to animal testing