New 3D brain tissue model accelerates Alzheimer's drug development

How can Alzheimer's research be made faster, better, and more effective? After decades of intensive research worldwide and despite recent therapeutic advances, scientists have not managed to fully arrest the progress of the disease.

What we are still lacking is three-dimensional models that accurately replicate the complex interactions in human brain tissue with Alzheimer's disease."

This is precisely the area in which his team has now made major progress - with potentially far-reaching consequences for the development of new drugs against Alzheimer's disease. The group reported the exciting new results in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

For laypeople, it always seems a bit like magic when researchers take stem cells and grow tissues that resemble the human original. According to Dominik Paquet, however, it takes a mixture of scientific creativity, technical skills, and patience: "It took us nine years," says the neuroscientist, "to develop our new, three-dimensional model of human brain tissue before it worked at all necessary levels." What does he mean by all necessary levels, we might ask? For Alzheimer's research, the interaction of different cell types and their biochemical functions are the most important thing - much more so than the exact replication of the structure of the brain.