What do you mean I’m not on the guest list?!
I’m Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science! Geez!
Like an exclusive club, our brains have a bouncer: the blood-brain barrier or B-B-B.
It guards your brain from intruders in your bloodstream. But some diseases can compromise the barrier, making it LEAK. How can we stop them?
Enter Dr. Lan Dao and team at the University of Cincinnati. They used cells from a donor with a leaky blood-brain barrier to make tissue-like organoids. These mimicked the B-B-B.
And? They even had neurons, astrocytes, glucose transporters, and blood vessels!
These new organoids also let us test how drug therapies can enter the brain.
So kick rocks, gatecrashing diseases. Go take a leak somewhere else!
Reference: Dao, L., You, Z., Lu, L., Xu, T., Sarkar, A. K., Zhu, H., Liu, M., Calandrelli, R., Yoshida, G., Lin, P., Miao, Y., Mierke, S., Kalva, S., Zhu, H., Gu, M., Vadivelu, S., Zhong, S., Huang, L. F., & Guo, Z. (2024). Modeling blood-brain barrier formation and cerebral cavernous malformations in human PSC-derived organoids. Cell stem cell, 31(6), 818–833.e11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2024.04.019