Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

By default.

Almost by default.

So it's actually not that difficult to make neurons.

So in those early days, you know, you would take those cells, play them nicely, those pluripotent stem cells in a dish, and then remove some of these factors.

And then within a few days, you will see that they'll change shape.

And within a few weeks, some of them will really look like neurons.

And when you look at them, you can even look at proteins that only neurons will have.

You can actually get an electrode inside a cell and listen to the electrical activity.

So it was very exciting, as maybe you remember in those days.

I mean, you know, this bursting curiosity is always sort of like the ATP of the life in the lab, so to speak.

I mean, you just kind of want to wake up and want to go see what happened to those cells.

And it was clear in those days that, you know, we would be able to make those cells, but would we actually see any abnormalities in those cells?

I think it was like the question.

You know, how would you know if you derive cells from a patient with autism, how would you know that you found anything abnormal?

I think that was like the question.

You know, we didn't even know what would be abnormal in the brain.

And so that's when we decided actually to focus on something that would be relatively predictable.

And that was this mutation in a calcium channel, which was discovered just a few years before in very few patients that had essentially one single letter in their entire genome changed.

in a gene that makes a protein known as a calcium channel, sits in excitable cells, meaning cardiac cells and brain cells.

And every time a cell receives electrical input, this protein opens up and lets calcium go inside the cell.