Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

I mean, every time we keep cells in a dish, you want them to stick.

That's the major problem.

So they were actually coded so the cells will never stick.

And then there were like these balls of cells, they were floating there.

And of course, I remember talking in the lab and everybody was like, oh, they're not going to survive.

It's going to be a couple of weeks and they're going to...

And then a week passed and two weeks passed, and then they kept growing and growing.

And, of course, the enthusiasm of every day to see, are they still alive?

And then we discovered that we can keep them for months.

And these three-dimensional cultures are now known as organoids, which is perhaps not the most fortunate name because it suggests that it's organ-like.

And of course, they're not an entire organ.

So they're not a representation of the entire brain.

But that's sort of like the term that we refer these days to anything that is sort of like three-dimensional and organizing in some way.

And so we started keeping these cultures.

And then at one point, actually, we discovered that we can pretty much keep them indefinitely.

My lab maintained the longest cultures that have ever been reported, like literally going for years, for two, three years in a dish.

And at one point in those early days when I was running out of funds in the lab and I came one day in lab meeting, I'm really, you know, determined to for us to actually like cut costs.

So I've told everybody, go into your incubators because we're spending so much money in feeding the cells and everybody throws out 20 percent of your cultures.

And then people started saying, so should I throw the ones that are like 500 days old?

And somebody was like, the ones that are 800 days old?