Can drugs to manage Alzheimer’s disease be tested in organoids? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Drugs to manage symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease may work in some people but not in others. Now a new method using brain organoids, which are derived from a person’s own blood sample, may help determine whether a specific medication is likely to help. Vasiliki Machairaki, a genetic medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, describes what was done.

Machairaki: In this study we did both drug screening and detect what's going on with the organoids before applying the drug and after applying the drug. We show that some of the patients respond and some not. There is a group that didn't respond which gives us a sense that they organoids can reflect by the heterogeneity in their exposure to the drug.     :23

Brain organoids are grown from stem cells derived from a blood sample, and take about two months to develop. Machairaki notes that they represent a personalized medicine approach to disease management, and perhaps may be used to determine timing of medication usage and dose. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.