A Closer Look at Alzheimer’s Disease

The clinical and research perspectives on Alzheimer’s disease converge in the latest installment of “A Closer Look.” Douglas Galasko, MD shares the basics of Alzheimer’s including biomarkers of the disease, current treatment options, and what physicians know. Larry Goldstein, PhD explains how researchers are using stem cell technology to search for new drugs to treat Alzheimer’s. An informative Q& A moderated by Alysson Muotri, PhD highlights the work to come and the practical questions surrounding new treatment possibilities.

“A Closer Look” aims to share emerging research and clinical strategies to help patients be informed and empowered. Take a look at our archive for in depth presentations on Parkinson’s disease, prostate cancer, and more.

Watch A Closer Look At…Alzheimer’s Disease.

Searching for Autism in our Social Brain

All animals need to know and communicate with their own, so evolution has developed in every brain the ways we all recognize and socialize with each other.

But while other brains are social – no other brain is as social, or can do what the human brain can – and as far as science knows – it also seems that no other brain can suffer from conditions like autism. Are these two fortunes somehow linked?

That is a question that many are asking, including Alysson Muotri’s lab at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. They are using brain organoids to unravel this mystery, but where do they start looking for the root causes of these conditions?

Enter Katerina Semendeferi, noted biological anthropologist, whose experience conducting neuroanatomical comparisons of our primate predecessors, as well as typical and atypical human neuroanatomy, is helping to focus the search for causes of atypical behavioral conditions like autism and Williams Syndrome. Her work has pointed to neuroanatomical differences, on scales from whole brain structures, down to individual neurons and the genetics of neurodevelopment.

She reveals what she has found, and how this helps the Muotri Lab’s studies with brain organoids in the search for autism in our social brains.

Watch — Searching for Autism in our Social Brain

3D Printing with Stem Cells

Transplants are expensive and risky, and donor organs are in short supply. Researchers at UC San Diego are working on technology to change all of that. It’s called bioprinting. In simple terms, bioprinting is 3D printing with living tissue. Researcher Shaochen Chen has been perfecting the process in his lab for years.

Bioprinting is a complex process that takes place in a matter of seconds right before your eyes. Chen’s lab builds their own printing machines, which shine light into a gel the team has developed. Any spot the light hits becomes solid. Because the process uses light, it allows the team to recreate microscopic structures like liver cells or vascular networks with incredible precision.

While the process enables researchers to accurately reproduce biological structures, it’s what’s inside the gel that makes bioprinting truly remarkable. The gel can be filled with stem cells from a potential transplant recipient. Those cells can fuse with tissue in the body as the gel disintegrates, essentially repairing damage with the patient’s own cells. Chen’s lab has shown the process can work in rats with severe spinal cord injuries. Someday, the process could be used in humans to do the same.

Bioprinting is also helpful to researchers in other fields. Chen has teamed up with Alysson Muotri and Karl Wahlin to help them study the connection between the eye and the brain. Their labs are conducting research using organoids – tiny organ-like structures grown from stem cells. They realized in order to effectively study how brain and retinal organoids interact with one another, they need to physically separate them at just the right distance, similar to how they might be separated in the womb. Chen’s lab developed a bioprinted structure to achieve that separation, taking the partnership to the next level.

Watch — 3D Printing with Stem Cells – Shaochen Chen

Brain-Powered Robot

It sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie. Scientists grow brains in a lab and use them to power robots. But, it’s really happening at UC San Diego – to a degree. Stem cell researcher Alysson Muotri has teamed up with a high school student for the groundbreaking project. It’s called the Neurobot, and it’s really cool.

It all started thanks to a high school student with a lot of talent and initiative. Christopher Caligiuri read about the work the Muotri lab was doing with brain organoids and wanted to get involved. He reached out and said he would love to help, and had some experience in robotics if that was useful. Muotri not only agreed, he put the sophomore on a pretty impressive project.

To understand how the Neurobot works, you have to understand the basics of the Muotri lab’s brain organoid research. Brain organoids are clusters of brain cells grown in the lab from human stem cells. They don’t contain every type of brain cell, nor do they have the all the various structures of full-fledged brains. They certainly aren’t capable of independent thought. But, they do give off electrical signals, similar to those of a developing fetus.

The team is using those signals to control the Neurobot. Researchers in the Muotri lab collect and record signal data from the organoids. That data is then fed into the robot through software Caligiuri developed. The software interprets the data as a speed commands, which control how fast the Neurobot walks. If you think it sounds cool, you have to see it in action.

Watch — Neurobot: Robotics Meets Stem Cells

Neanderthal Among Us? Science Meets Fiction

What makes us human is a question that not only science asks, but all disciplines of mind from philosophy to religion to sociology and ethics, and even to storytelling and the arts.

Tim Disney’s new movie “William” is about a Neanderthal living in the modern world and forces us to ask about humanness and many other questions.

Disney’s movie provides a foil to explore many facets of human nature and sociology, and raises questions about technology and its present and future effects on the human phenomenon.

With research interests and experience exploring the distinctions in the Neanderthal and Human genomes, Alysson Muotri, Director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program, brought together a panel of experts from across a spectrum of disciplines to explore these issues in a lively and engaging forum with the movie’s creator.

Watch — Neanderthal Among Us? Science Meets Fiction – A Discussion of Tim Disney’s Motion Picture “William”