Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

It turns out that most inhibitory neurons are not born in the cortex, but they're born deep in the brain.

So essentially, all we did is we made two brain regions, the ones that has excitatory neurons and the one that has inhibitor neurons.

And the plan was to put them together, hoping that at one point, the cells will know what to do.

And in fact, that was one of the first projects in my lab, planning that.

And I remember I gave to one of the students this very difficult task of figuring out how we're going to fuse these two cultures.

And they're about three millimeters in size, so you can see them by eye.

And I thought it was going to be very difficult to put them together.

So the student worked for months trying to figure out, like, biological glues, you know, kind of like using various electrodes and impaling them and everything else until somebody else came one day and said, like, it's very simple.

You just put them at the bottom of a tiny Eppendorf tube, which is the tiniest, like, of tubes that you get.

You put them there overnight, and next day they're completely fused.

But they're not just fused because now if you look inside, within a few days, the cells that are supposed to move start to actually point out towards the cortex.

They literally smell the chemicals from the cortex and they start to move in this very stereotypical way towards the cortex.

And so that was the first disembloid made around 2015.

And I still remember it was Ben, actually.

Ben was so excited.

Ben Barris was so excited about like seeing the cells.

He wanted to look at these movies every day.

And then he said, I still have this email from him where he was very preoccupied that he kept saying like this new preparation is not an organoid.

It's not a steroid.

It's something else.