Stem cells are just the beginning when it comes to modeling your risk for Alzheimer’s disease, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Cells from your blood can be induced to return to what they looked like when you were an embryo, then can be made to develop into different cell types in the brain. That happens in the lab of Vasiliki Machairaki, a cell engineering expert at Johns Hopkins.

Machairaki: We can have a stem cell back and we can from all these individuals that we take blood from then we can decide what we call differentiate. We can save the cells now you will become neurons or astrocytes or microglia so any single cell type that can be affected from Alzheimer's disease we are studying so different brain cell types.     :24

Machairaki explains how powerful this model is.

Machairaki: We can study how the disease progressed, how the disease transmits and we can also study drugs to see how they respond and then we are talking about personalized things.  :12

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.