Scientists Kept Human Brain Organoids Alive for 5 Years…

Scientists Kept Human Brain Organoids Alive for 5 Years, and They Age Just Like a Real Brain Human brain development is extraordinarily slow, taking nearly two decades to fully mature. This has made it genuinely difficult to study, since lab grown brain organoids have traditionally survived only weeks to months, capturing just the earliest stages of that process. A new study published in Nature changes that, researchers successfully cultured human cortical organoids for over 5 years, and found they continue to age in ways that closely mirror the real human brain. The core challenge this study addresses: Human brain cells mature at a genuinely species specific, unusually slow pace, something that's very hard to study using animal models or short term lab cultures. Existing organoid models have largely only recreated early developmental stages, leaving postnatal brain maturation, everything that happens after birth, largely inaccessible to researchers. What they did: Researchers grew human cortical organoids for over 5 years, profiling 34 individual organoids at time points ranging from 6 months to 5 years, and combining this with previously published data from organoids as young as 15 days. In total, they analyzed 110 organoids and over 424,000 individual cells. The key finding, organoids age appropriately, and on schedule: Using gene expression analysis, researchers found that organoid cells followed a genuinely sequential progressi