Brain Organoids: Emerging Platforms for Modern Neuroscience

作者：Lian Wang, Liwei Mao, Qing Cao, Xue-Mei Zong · 发表于：Brain Science · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.3390/brainsci16040427 · 研究领域：Medicine

Highlights What are the main findings? Brain organoids recapitulate key aspects of human brain development and disease, enabling human-relevant in vitro modeling. Advances in bioengineering and culture technologies improve structural organization, cellular diversity, and functional readouts of organoid systems. What are the implications of the main findings? Organoid platforms support mechanistic studies and facilitate drug discovery and disease modeling in neuroscience. Improving maturation, reproducibility, and ethical frameworks will be essential for advancing organoids toward translational applications. Abstract Brain organoids represent three-dimensional structures that allow for human-specific studies in brain development, pathology and therapeutics. These self-organizing systems, formed through the differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells, can mimic important cellular and molecular events of brain development and therefore serve as a platform for the investigation of neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, brain injuries, and tumorigenesis. Although brain organoids show promising perspectives in the study of human physiology, existing brain organoid platforms are hindered by issues of under vascularization, immaturity and protocol variability. Nevertheless, the rapid development of new bioengineering, microfluidic and multi-omics tools and approaches allows us to overcome existing problems and increase the physiological significance of these organoids...