There's a fascinating way to study the human brain. It sounds a bit like science fiction. We're talking brain organoids.

Simply put, a brain organoid is a miniature replica of the human brain.

It's Wednesday, January 17th, and yep, you guessed it, it's Science Friday. I'm Sci-Fi producer Shishana Bucksbao.

Brain organoids are clusters of human brain cells grown in the lab.

More and more, they're being used to better understand brain disorders

and eventually they might even help develop better treatments too.

IraFleto talks with a neuroscientist who created a new brain organoid model which mimics the cerebellum.

Dr. Georgia Quadrato is an assistant professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the

University of Southern California based in Los Angeles.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to Science Friday. Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

It's so nice to have you because you work on something

really exciting, which I want to get right into.

What exactly is an organoid and how do you grow brain organoids in the lab?

Yes, simply put, a brain organoid is a miniature replica of the human brain.

And to grow this brain organoid, we start from human pluripotence themselves.

And these are cells that have the capability to differentiate into any cell type of our body. So we start with those.

We make aggregate, small aggregates of these pluripotence themselves and then we use some chemical

factor to differentiate them into different brain tissue. So the size of these

organoids is about 2 millimeter, so they are really, really tiny.

Is that like a grain of rice or something like that?

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