february, 2025
Event Details
Omer Revah from the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine, The Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agricultural, Food & Environment, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem will held a talk about “Using stem cells to build a model of the human cortex in vivo” during the MBExC Lecture on 13 February, 2025 at 1 p.m. at the lecture hall, MPI-NAT City Campus, Hermann-Rein-Str. 3, 37075 Göttingen.
Abstract
Stem cell-derived brain organoids offer new opportunities to model human brain development and disease. However, one major drawback of these tissue cultures is that they invariably fail to properly mature when maintained in vitro. This talk will focus on our recent studies demonstrating that cortical organoid transplantation into newborn rats can be used to model late stages of human cortical development. It will show that human cortical organoids transplanted into the brain of newborn rats display advanced transcriptional, morphological and functional properties, which resemble those of postnatal human cells, and that advanced maturation enables discovery of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD)-associated neuronal phenotypes. I will also show a novel graft platform which contains both excitatory and inhibitory populations, enabling the study of complex human cortical circuit-level electrophysiology in NDDs. Finally, I will discuss how these platforms offer new opportunities to test gene therapies in an in vivo context.
Host: Dr. Maria-Patapia Zafeiriou, University Medical Center Göttingen
Poster of the talk: 
