Brain organoids can resemble specific parts of the brain, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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What might a model of the hindbrain, which helps control functions like sleep, breathing and heart rate, tell us about using a common depression drug in people with Alzheimer’s disease? Genetic medicine expert Vasiliki Machairaki at Johns Hopkins says her most recent study utilized such a model derived from cells in blood samples from people with the disease.

Machairaki: We generated organoids specific that they resemble the hindbrain. These organoids are enriched in serotonergic neurons. We will need to see first if the organoids from Alzheimer's disease patients are different from the healthy individuals. We will be able to detect proteins. This proteomic analysis which we show that, that we will see that we detected proteins that this differentially expressed between these two cohorts.  :27

Machairaki says these differences may help pinpoint whether escitalopram or perhaps other medicines might be useful in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and provides information on a person by person basis. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.