Stanford University researchers have successfully transplanted lab-grown human brain tissue into genetically engineered mice, creating a new experimental platform scientists say could dramatically expand their ability to study neurological and psychiatric disorders that have long been difficult to research directly in living human brains.

The findings, published online September 16 in the journal Nature, describe an approach the research team calls "xenocortication." Scientists engineered a strain of mice so that most of their neocortex and hippocampus, the brain regions responsible for higher cognitive functions and memory, never formed during early development. Researchers then transplanted human cortical organoids, self-organizing, three-dimensional clusters of laboratory-grown tissue that resemble specific regions of the developing brain, into the resulting cavity shortly after birth.

Cortical organoids are created by reprogramming human skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, which can then be coaxed to differentiate into most of the body's cell types, including the specialized neurons and support cells found in the brain's outer cortex. The technique builds on years of prior work by the study's senior author, Sergiu Pașca, a neuroscientist and stem cell biologist who holds the Kenneth T. Norris Endowed Professorship in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and directs the university's Brain Organogenesis Program.

According to Stanford's own reporting on the study, the transplanted human tissue did not simply survive inside the mice; it expanded rapidly, eventually accounting for more than 90% of the total cortical tissue volume within........

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