Next-Generation Screening Platforms: BBB Organoids and Beyond

Kaitlin Kelleher:
Hello and welcome to this podcast from Cambridge Healthtech Institute for the blood-brain barrier meeting, part of the World Preclinical Congress taking place June 18th through 21st, 2018 in Boston. I'm Kaitlin Kelleher, conference producer.

Today I'm talking to one of our speakers, Dr. Choi-Fong Cho, an instructor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Thanks for being here today Dr. Cho.

Choi-Fong Cho:
Hi Kaitlin, thank you for having me.

Kaitlin Kelleher:
So you're speaking at the blood-brain barrier conference about your BBB organoids work. Could you give us a summary of this work and a preview of what you'll be speaking about in June?

Choi-Fong Cho:
So at this conference I'll be talking about these blood-brain barrier organoids that we have recently published last year, and what it is really offering is a tool, a novel tool and a next generation tool, that we're hoping can offer the neuroscience community a platform that can allow and facilitate drug discovery and drug development in accelerated fashion.

So traditionally, the kind of blood-brain barrier models that the community was using in the past is a Transwell model that has not been exactly great at reproducing the blood-brain barrier function and properties, and so what we're really introducing here is a new model, which is able to recapitulate the blood-brain barrier functions a lot better and in our hands when we have tested them, we were able to see that we can accurately predict the ability of a particular compound to get across the blood-brain barrier.

What these blood-brain barrier organoids are is that they're a lump of cells, I guess you can call them, a ball of cells that are spherical. They're about 300 microns in size. They're relatively small, but you can still see them, so they're macroscopic, and they're consisted of astrocytes in the core of the sphere and the thelia cells or the brain endothelial cells and brain parasites that encase the surface of the spheroid and that's actually what is constituting the blood-brain barrier function. So this surface within the sphere is what prevents the compound from the environment to go into the core.

You can think about it as a miniature blood-brain barrier that we can culture in-vitro in a dish that is outside of the living system and what we have found is that we can use these organoids or these spheroids and accurately test for drug permeability across the blood-brain barrier and then go in devo and validate our compounds.

Kaitlin Kelleher:
What is the next steps you'll be taking in this research for blood-brain barrier modeling and screening in general?

Choi-Fong Cho:
So certainly, the next steps that we're going to be taking are a variety of different steps because there's a large amount of applications that can be applied with these spheroids. One of the things that we're doing here is to investigate new compounds and new drugs in our BBB platform here, and as a matter of fact, we're also designing new compounds, which we want to try to see if we can improve certain existing compounds and their ability to get across the blood-brain barrier and decides that because these spheroids are able to recapitulate the BBB mechanisms and functions, we're also hoping to be able to unlock new mechanisms and perhaps regulatory processes and pathways in greater detail and look at in a way that has never been done before.

Kaitlin Kelleher:
What are you most looking forward to seeing at the blood-brain barrier conference?

Choi-Fong Cho:
So I think that there are certainly a large variation of topics that will be covered by the Preclinical Conference here and I'm certainly very looking forward to looking at more or listening to talks that covers the CNS disease models about the blood-brain barrier, and also to look at what other people are doing in terms of drug discovery and development and this is also an area that's heavily focused on my lab, so I'm very excited about that.

Kaitlin Kelleher:
Thank you so much for your time today Dr. Cho.

Choi-Fong Cho:
Yes, thank you Kaitlin.

Kaitlin Kelleher:
That was Dr. Choi-Fong Cho of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She'll be speaking at the blood-brain barrier meeting at the World Preclinical Congress this June 19th. If you'd like to hear her in person, go to worldpreclinicalcongress.com for registration information and enter the key code PODCAST. I'm Kaitlin Kelleher, thank you for listening.