Sergiu Pasca
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Living human brain cells are almost impossible to study directly in patients, which has slowed progress on neurological and psychiatric disorders. The lab grows neural organoids, small 3D clusters of brain-like tissue made from stem cells that each resemble a specific brain region.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Genetics
- Topics
neural organoids
assembloids
brain organoids
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Nov 2029
What they work on
- Generate and functionally characterize human stem cell-derived organoids that resemble the spinal cord floor plate, the midline structure that guides crossing axons.
- Join floor plate organoids on both sides with dorsal spinal cord organoids to form midline assembloids that recreate human axon crossing, then study axon guidance defects after neurodevelopmental disease genes are lost.
- Establish forebrain assembloids combining excitatory glutamatergic and inhibitory GABAergic neurons transplanted into the rat cortex, and characterize how they integrate and function.
- Apply transplanted assembloids to model excitation-inhibition imbalance and early cortical circuit defects in severe neurodevelopmental disorders caused by genetic mutations.
More about the research
It then joins different organoids into "assembloids" to study how neurons migrate and form circuits. Two projects extend this approach: one rebuilds how nerve fibers cross the body's midline, and the other places assembloids into the rat brain so human neurons can mature further.
Why it matters
By giving researchers access to living human neural circuits, these models could reveal the cellular defects and molecular mechanisms behind genetic neurodevelopmental disorders. These include conditions involving faulty midline wiring and excitation-inhibition imbalance. Such insight could eventually support therapy development for psychiatric and neurological disorders, where lack of access to human brain tissue has slowed progress.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Define how the fly receptor Frazzled/DCC recruits and regulates the Wave Regulatory Complex, a set of proteins that builds actin filaments, during Netrin-driven axon attraction, building on studies of disease-causing human DCC variants.
Yang Yang
Purdue University, IN·Neuroscience
Map how loss of Scn2a changes neurons in the medial prefrontal cortex, a social-behavior hub, using brain-slice patch-clamp recordings of synaptic excitation and inhibition plus Neuropixels high-density probes to record firing in behaving mice.
Timothy M Gomez
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Neuroscience
Identify which EGF-family ligands (EGF and Neuregulins) and ErbB receptors trigger growth cones to form and mature invadosomes, actin-based protrusions that degrade matrix, using gain- and loss-of-function manipulations and fluorescence imaging of cultured neurons.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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