Project Grant R21NS132008

The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York (Columbia University), through its Health Sciences Division, was awarded a $445,009 Project Grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders program (CFDA 93.853). The grant's objective is to develop approaches for introducing developmentally-relevant inputs and reading out neuronal activity in human brain organoids to advance their functional maturity as a model for later stages of human brain development and disease states. Specifically, the project will test strategies to replace or mimic missing external inputs via prolonged patterned stimulation of human brain organoids and observe the resulting effects on network activity and gene expression, benchmarking these observations to existing data sets from human cortical organoids as well as the human and rodent brain. The tools and approaches established through this project are intended to be adapted to cell culture models of other organ systems where neuronal inputs are important. The grant period runs from September 8, 2023 to August 31, 2025.