Explaining what your research is about in a clear and concise way isn’t easy, especially if your audience has little or no prior knowledge of the subject. That’s why UAntwerp organises PRESS>SPEAK, an annual writing and presenting competition for young researchers taking their first steps in science communication. Every year, the winners of the writing contest are featured on the Pintra blog.
For the PRESS>SPEAK writing competition, researchers were instructed to explain their research in a text of three paragraphs of max. 150 words. They also had to come up with a pithy title, a striking subtitle, and a picture illustrating the difference their research aims to make in society. The third and last winning text, written by Julia Di Stefano (Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences), is about recreating a whole brain.
Building brains
Imagine recreating a whole brain in a lab: studying the mechanisms and the processes that regulate all the neuronal functions would be so much easier! It would be possible to analyse both a healthy brain or one that is affected by some kind of disease. Finding new treatments then could become way more simple!
In addition, we could monitor and have much more control over the brain’s development. Not only that, but it would also be ethical because in this way, the early stage of the research wouldn’t need to use animal models. Another key advantage, is that we could save a huge amount of time; experiments with cells, in fact, take far shorter times than those performed with animals. Finally, it’s much cheaper working with this type of model than performing any animal experiment.
Ongoing research – The recipe for building a brain
To get this brain built, what I do in my PhD project is growing small aggregates of mouse neural cells called neurospheres, that I culture until they reach the size of a poppy seed.
The 3 main ingredients that constitute neurospheres are the 3 most common cell types in the brain: neurons, astrocytes and microglia. By using them, I can reproduce and study inflammation in the brain, which is a characteristic present in many diseases. And because so many diseases involve neuro-inflammation, it’s very important to understand what leads to this, so that we could also put an end to it. Using a quite simple and fast protocol (5 weeks), I can obtain hundreds and hundreds of neurospheres. In this way, I can test so many different compounds and look for those who reduce or solve neuroinflammation.
Having this type of model opens so many doors. It means we can not only better understand the dynamics that cause inflammation, but also test a big number of drugs and find which ones are able to cure it. And all of it, in a very short time! Most of the research in this field nowadays uses human cells; but the pros of using mouse neurospheres instead, are having a faster and cheaper protocol, that can guide to the selection of new medicines.
Let the brain-building begin!
