Indiana University will be home to one of two national centers studying Alzheimer’s disease using human brain models
Photo Courtesy of Tim Yates, IU School of Medicine
Indianapolis will be home to one of two federally backed centers studying Alzheimer’s disease using stem-cell models of the human brain.
Researchers at the IU School of Medicine have received a five-year, $16.5 million grant to better understand the underlying causes of Alzheimer’s.
The funding comes through the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health. The second center to receive funding will be located at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
What will set the research at IU apart is the use of so-called “brain organoids” – human stem cells organized into three-dimensional models meant to mimic aspects of the human brain on a small scale.
Basically, small human lab brains.
Jason Meyer is a professor of Medical and Molecular Genetics at the IU School of Medicine. He said previous Alzheimer’s research focused heavily on mice brains.
“I think what we really want to emphasize is how this is really pushing the field of Alzheimer’s disease research into new areas,” he said.
Meyer said their research will use the models to better understand what’s going wrong in an Alzheimer’s brain, including degeneration of cells and blood flow.
“We’re going to be looking at initially what’s going wrong in the cells, looking at particularly those inflammatory responses in the cells, and how that leads to degeneration of the brain cells,” he said.
The research will hopefully lead to medicines based on their discoveries.
The cellular models developed by IU will be made available to Alzheimer’s researchers more broadly, according to Meyer.
The other advantage of cell-based models is that clinical trials can be extremely expensive. Human cell models will be a bridge between animal models and expensive trials.
“Previously, we have not had really good models that can help to bridge that gap between research that had been done in some animal models and then the next jump from that, typically was going into a clinical trials,” Meyer said.
The grant officially began in July of this year.
Contact Health Reporter Benjamin Thorp at bthorp@wfyi.org.