We move now, though, to your brain.

Health matters.

Organoids are allowing researchers at Unlv to ask new questions about Alzheimer's disease.

That's according to Jefferson Kinney, founding chair of the Department of Brain Health at Unlv.

pieces of tissue derived from cells that are grown in a lab and mimic real organs, including the brain.

what the organoid system allows us to do is to study both the biology of Alzheimer's disease in a way that really wasn't that possible up until the last few years, because of organoids, because of the organoids.

So the the way that we studied as a field, the the pathology of Alzheimer's disease was typically either in postmortem tissue or in these animal models that render some really good information about the pathology and about the biology.

But it wasn't a really good representation of what's going on.

So in the brain of someone who had passed away or in an animal, an animal model?

Yeah.

Yes.

Anything in the brain is a very protected space, so it's really hard to look in and see and study what is going on in these diseases and what the organoids provide.

The opportunity to do is these small brains in a dish.

And by that I really mean they're small pieces of a brain.

It's not a whole intact, functioning brain, but it's derived from patients.

It is something that is exactly what comes from the disease, and it allows us to both study mechanisms.

But even more than that, in the last year, there's been a real increase in the utility of these to study treatments.

So instead of having to go through a large number of different steps, there's now the possibility to check to see if a treatment has any efficacy in one of these organoid systems.

Why that movement toward organoids and who is leading it?

The real shift here was that about a year ago, the FDA and the National Institutes of Health, which funds a lot of the research that we and others do, really started outlining that they wanted what's called novel alternative methods to be driving some of the science in this field.

And one of the novel alternative methods.

So one of them is AI and science.

One of them is big data.

One of them is these organoid systems.

And what really changed is they highlighted that they're now willing to take data from organoid systems as proof of concept into clinical trials.

So it used to be you had to test a potential treatment in an animal system.

You had to see that it had viability and then you could try and move into it.

They're now willing to accept organoid data, using compounds and testing their viability to be able to advance a treatment.

And this accelerates timeline for treatment.

It accelerates our ability to understand what a treatment is doing, and the sort of outer orbit of that is.

It also accelerates our ability to look for novel biomarkers of disease, to look at disease mechanisms all within these same systems.

That sounds like a huge deal.

It is.

It is.

It's it's a it's a leap forward.

So my background is in cell molecular biology.

And I used to do a lot of work with these preclinical models.

And we have shelved all of that work because of the utility.

And what we can glean from these organoid systems.

the biggest difference is that these preclinical models were engineered to model the disease.

But there are many aspects of what happens in humans that they don't render accurately.

Right.

This has come up many times as perhaps some of the reasons some treatments have failed that work very well in the animal models, but didn't in humans.

The difference here is that these organoids are derived from patients.

So we have organoids growing that are from Alzheimer's disease patients in cognitively normal controls.

So we're not questioning if we're rendering what's happening in the patients.

This is from the patient.

is that why the National Institutes of Health is now signing on to this?

Because it's developed to a certain point.

I mean, why wasn't this happening years ago?

So that's a very good question.

So part of it is the techniques and the accuracy of directing them into a certain type of cell.

Part of it is a sort of seachange in terms of what we have been looking at and to try something new.

And there has been some remarkable science in these organoid systems, not just in Alzheimer's disease, in lots of different fields.

So it's it's risen to this level that.

Now, can you give an example?

So there's organoids that are used in all sorts of cancer research that have shown tremendous promise.

There's actually a remarkable one from a few years ago about renal failure that organoids were very useful for.

And now that these systems are very stable and that they are well understood into brain focused efforts, it now becomes a venue to study this for Alzheimer's disease and for other neurodegenerative diseases in a way you've never been able to before, right?

The ethics of it, though, there's the issue of, are these organoids alive themselves?

Are they conscious?

Can they feel anything?

Yeah.

So it's an interesting question, especially since the stem cell preamble to the, you know, the tissue biopsy and taking these was where they were derived from.

And there were ethics there with the organoid is the ones we work with are cortical organoids.

So these are basically cortical neurons that assemble in ways to connect to one another.

But there's absolutely no sensory system in any way shape or form there.

So the way you see me, the way you hear me is very specific.

Receptors decode that information, transmit it to the brain.

It gets assembled into some sort of story that your brain puts together.

There is none of that input into these.

There is no sense.

There is no interaction.

Is that in the future, I doubt it.

I mean, I suppose so.

The organoid is the first layer we get into.

I think I think the people who came up with this have really started to have fun with words.

So the first version is an organoid.

The next layer that we're working with is something called an assembly.

And that's the neurons.

That is basically a cortex.

Cortex.

And embedded in there are glia or immune cells because that has a role in these diseases.

I'm sure at some point people are going to keep on putting pieces together, but I can envision that they would do something to have a perceiving, growing, aware thing in a dish that seems like a very strange direction and would be open to a lot of issues.

Five years from now, where do you see unfold in this work of organoids?

So that's a great question.

So in a really good progression of this, I think where we are right now, what we've done in the last year, year and a half, we've been doing this, there are some remarkable insights that we're starting to see in terms of understanding the biology of disease.

There are some really clever indications of some novel biomarkers for detection of disease, and I expect that this will be far more developed for screening possible therapies.

One of the things that's going to happen in the next year or two is different groups doing this at different places are going to have to sort of start to align and compare our notes, because there are ways that what happens at one facility and another may differ.

And I think that we're in a position that we can be one of those groups as well.

Wonderful.

Doctor Kenny, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week.

Absolutely.