Human-Derived Brain Organoids Create Functional Networks in Mice

By transplanting human brain organoids into mice, researchers created a new in vivo platform that could advance the study of human neural functions and drug testing.  

Originally written by Mariella Bodemeier Loayza Careaga, PhD, on Sep 16, 2026

 

Researchers created a new transplantation mouse model that shows extensive connectivity between human-derived brain organoid cells (green and red) and the mouse host brain (blue). Image credit: Pasca lab, Stanford University. (CC BY 4.0)

For over a decade, Stanford University neuroscientist Sergiu Pasca has looked for strategies to study human brain functions and its disorders. In Pasca’s eyes, using human induced pluripotent stem cells to create human-derived brain organoids—three-dimensional, self-organized tissues grown in a dish—and transplanting them into rodent hosts is an opportunity to achieve this goal.

In a study published in Nature, his team described a new mouse model into which they transplanted human-derived neural organoids and showed how these structures integrate into the mouse brain.1 The grafts not only developed into distinct human brain cells that show incipient signs of local organization, but they also extensively connected with the host’s nervous system to be functionally active and regulate the animal’s behavior.

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