Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine created lab-grown brain organoids from cells of people with Alzheimer’s disease to study how they respond to the antidepressant escitalopram oxalate.
The organoids, made from blood cells reprogrammed into stem cells, replicated key molecular features of the disease. Some showed increased proteins linked to serotonin signaling after treatment, while others displayed little change.
Vasiliki Machairaki, the study leader, said the models could help identify patient subgroups likely to benefit from certain drugs. The work also examined extracellular vesicles released by the organoids as potential biomarkers for diagnosis and disease staging.
The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, appeared in Alzheimer’s & Dementia. It involved hundreds of organoids from patients and healthy controls, focusing on the hindbrain region.
Machairaki plans further development of the models to include immune cells and vascular structures for greater realism.
