What is an organoid? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Using induced stem cells helps create models for diseases like Alzheimer’s disease that can be studied in a lab, but now three dimensional cell collections called organoids can also be developed from stem cells. Vasiliki Machairaki, a cell engineering expert at Johns Hopkins, explains.

Machairaki: It's a 3D structure. So I can take the human embryonic cells and I can make neurons. And I can grow them as a sphere. What we are trying to do is like mimic what’s going on in the human brain development, growing them as a small sphere floating, then we can add different factors, transcription factors. And these cells they have this basic information and they know what they are going to do.      :26

Machairaki says organoids have cell types other than neurons that are found in the brain and impact structure, function and disease progression, so including them in studies of Alzheimer’s disease helps create a better picture of what happens in the brain. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.