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The research, by an international team from the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Technical University of Denmark, used 3D printing to create scaffolds for engineered flat brain organoids. The scaffolds allowed the brain organoid size to be significantly increased and after 20 days, self-generated folding was observed. Their results are published in the IOP Publishing journal
The work aims to address several of the shortcomings of existing brain organoids. One of the lead authors, Theresa Rothenbücher, said: The lack of vascularization leads to diffusion limitations for nutrients and oxygen, resulting in a necrotic tissue core for organoids larger than approximately 500 μm. In an attempt to solve this problem, brain organoids have been vascularized. While including endothelial cells in the culture system increases the complexity of the model, the generated vessel structures show no functionality (blood flow) in vitro. We are able to circumvent this issue by apply