Host: The Japanese Society of Toxicology
Name : The 51st Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Toxicology
Date : July 03, 2024 - July 05, 2024
When cultured in a three-dimensional way, pluripotent stem cells spontaneously mimic the developmental processes of organs partially. The three-dimensional tissues "organoids" have significant advantages. For example, they can be used to investigate the toxicity and efficacy of drugs on human cells. They can also overcome the differences between the three-dimensional environment within tissues and two-dimensional cultured cells. Particularly, since it is extremely difficult to extract a living human brain, human neural organoids are valuable in the search for neurological diseases. Another advantage of organoids is that they are easy to observe and manipulate since they are created outside the body. Furthermore, within organoids, multiple types of cells can gather to create a physiological environment similar to that found in vivo. However, there are also challenges associated with organoids. Although they can mimic the early stages of development, they currently remain in an immature state due to the time required for maturation, making it difficult to mimic an adult brain. Variability may also pose problems. Spontaneously created neural organoids can only mimic a portion of the brain, making it challenging to mimic the entire nervous system, which consists of numerous interconnected regions. Therefore, we are working on connecting multiple neural organoids to construct neural circuits. In this presentation, I would like to introduce the current state of neural organoids and circuit-modeling and discuss their possibilities.
