Senior CMRI researcher, Professor Phil Robinson, is part of an international team who have just received $7.5m for their work in brain development.

Professor Robinson is head of CMRI’s Cell Signalling Unit. It looks at how signals are sent from one cell to another around the body with a focus on diseases such as cancer, epilepsy, kidney disease and coronaviruses.

The international team he is working with is named DEVELOPNOID and are focused on studying early brain development in health and disease. They have been awarded the grant by The Lundbeck Foundation in Denmark to support research which has an international impact.

When the brain does not develop correctly, diseases develop over time, from a few years to decades later. This can be studied in animals but not easily in humans. Using breakthrough technology, DEVELOPNOID will show how this can be done in a new model of human brain based on organoids.

The model produces induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from patients’ blood and differentiates them into brain organoids (BOs), the first exciting model for human brain development.

"Through DEVELOPNOID, we will develop the first platform to produce brain organoids from iPSCs at large scale,’’ Professor Robinson said. ``They will be derived from healthy individuals and Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia patients. These will be analysed by multiple approaches including imaging, pathology, proteomics, metabolomics and glycomics. We expect to reveal new molecular processes like how mature neurons communicate and to show how brain organoids reveal disease causative mechanisms that might ultimately be targeted with disease-modifying drugs.’’