These 3D model brains with cells from several people are first of their kind

For the first time, researchers have grown 3D models of the brain that include a wide variety of cell types from several people. These ‘village in a dish’ organoids could help to reveal why the brain’s response to drugs differs from person to person.

Other teams have made 2D sheets of brain cells sourced from more than one human donor, but this work reports 3D systems that are robust enough for research.

“It’s a really powerful technology, and a powerful approach,” says Tomasz Nowakowski, a biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. Many groups are likely to embrace this method, he adds. “It’s a technical tour de force.”

These chimeric cultures, which the authors call Chimeroids, combine cells from as many as five donors. But future iterations could host cells from hundreds of people. “What if one day we could use Chimeroids as avatars to predict individual responses to new therapeutics before testing these in a trial? I like to imagine that future,” says Paola Arlotta, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Chimeroids are also labour-intensive to grow, adds Nowakowski, who is experimenting with the model in his laboratory. But automated cell-culture systems should ease the workload and make these models viable for more-efficient experiments into diseases of the brain.

Image source: Antón-Bolanos et al. (2024), Nature.