Harvard Kept Human Brain Organoids Alive for Five Years — Long Enough to Watch Them Keep Time
A Harvard team led by Paola Arlotta, with lead authors Irene Faravelli and Noelia Antón-Bolaños, sustained lab-grown human brain organoids for more than five years — three times the previous 694-day record set by UCLA and Stanford researchers in 2021. Each organoid grew past a million cerebral cortex cells and appears to retain a molecular record of its own developmental age: when the team combined older and younger cells in one organoid, the older cells jumped ahead and produced the more mature neuron types they were developmentally due to make months before the younger cells reached the same point, apparently through DNA methylation acting as an internal clock. It's a real answer to a practical problem — organoids have generally died before diseases like Alzheimer's have time to develop in them — more than it's progress toward "organoid intelligence," whatever else gets written about it elsewhere.
Read at Harvard University / Nature