It's an achievement with important implications for scientists studying the brain and working on treatments for a broad range of neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
"This could be a hugely powerful model to help us understand how brain cells and parts of the brain communicate in humans," says Su-Chun Zhang, professor of neuroscience and neurology at UW-Madison's Waisman Center."It could change the way we look at stem cell biology, neuroscience, and the pathogenesis of many neurological and psychiatric disorders."
The results speak for themselves -- which is to say, the cells can speak to each other. The printed cells reach through the medium to form connections inside each printed layer as well as across layers, forming networks comparable to human brains. The neurons communicate, send signals, interact with each other through neurotransmitters, and even form proper networks with support cells that were added to the printed tissue.
"Our lab is very special in that we are able to produce pretty much any type of neurons at any time. Then we can piece them together at almost any time and in whatever way we like," Zhang says."Because we can print the tissue by design, we can have a defined system to look at how our human brain network operates. We can look very specifically at how the nerve cells talk to each other under certain conditions because we can print exactly what we want.
The new printing technique should also be accessible to many labs. It does not require special bio-printing equipment or culturing methods to keep the tissue healthy, and can be studied in depth with microscopes, standard imaging techniques and electrodes already common in the field. This study was supported in part by NIH-NINDS , NICHD , the National Medical Research Council of Singapore , Ministry of Education of Singapore , Aligning Science Across Parkinson's , the Bleser Family Foundation, and the Busta Foundation.Yuanwei Yan, Xueyan Li, Yu Gao, Sakthikumar Mathivanan, Linghai Kong, Yunlong Tao, Yi Dong, Xiang Li, Anita Bhattacharyya, Xinyu Zhao, Su-Chun Zhang.Researchers are gaining new insights into neurological diseases by studying circular RNAs in brain cells.
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