1 December 2020 – While many young people dream of creating movies or music when they grow older, new EMBO Young Investigator Luca Tiberi wanted to build artificial organs. “I have always been inspired by the idea of growing organs for people who suffer from heart attacks, cancer, strokes, or other diseases,” says Tiberi, a group leader at the Centre for Integrative Biology in Trento, Italy. So when, during a postdoc, he was offered an opportunity to use cerebral organoids to study brain development, he leapt at the chance. “Cerebral organoids are essentially small balls of different types of cells that act like miniature versions of the brain. It was really exciting – people were asking: Is it possible to create small brains in the lab?”
While recreating the entire brain is still not possible, the technique has advanced spectacularly in recent years and Tiberi’s group grow ‘healthy’ mini-brains and try to recreate tumours within them. His team recently produced the first organoid models for Medulloblastoma, a common and deadly childhood brain cancer. “Organoids are not exact replicas of the brain, but they open up new opportunities to study tumour formation because they are derived from human cells,” Tiberi explains. “If we can recreate tumours in these mini-brains, then it could be possible to test drugs on them, instead of directly in patients or mice.”
Tiberi hopes that his work could also help solve major puzzles relating to why humans are vulnerable to childhood brain cancers. “Paediatric brain cancer has human-specific features that we don’t understand: we want to learn more about normal brain development to try to understand the mechanisms affected by cancer,” he says. “Connections with the EMBO community have always been really important to me and as an EMBO Young Investigator perhaps even more so. I look forward to learning from community members around the world – and hopefully meeting some here in Trentino: the food, wine, mountains, and science are great and we would love for people to come and share their ideas.”
