New Podcast Episode. Evaluating the Expanding Models of Brain Disease

In this episode of The Stem Cell Report, our guests review the use of models of neurodevelopment to understand neuropsychiatric diseases, focusing on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, Down syndrome, and schizophrenia and provide critical appraisal of the impact of human-rodent xenografting approaches for advancing our understanding of those diseases and brain development.

Guests

• Giuseppe Testa is full professor of Molecular Biology at Milan’s Università Statale, Head of the Neurogenomics Research Centre at Human Technopole and Group Leader of the High-Definition Disease Modelling Lab at the European Institute of Oncology. Giuseppe is a member of the Stem Cell Reports Editorial Board and was recently elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization.  

• Marlene Pereira received a master’s degree in Biochemistry from the Universidade de Coimbra in Portugal, and a PhD in Systems Medicine from Universitá degli Studi di Milano, Italy. She was a postdoctoral scholar in the Testa Laboratory, and is currently expanding her training at UBC, a pharmaceutical company in Brussels Belgium, where she is integrating brain organoid approaches into commercial research. 

• Reinald Shyti received a master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and a PhD in Neuroscience from Leiden University Medical Center. Dr Shyti is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Testa Laboratory. 

Our guests authored the recently published paper in Stem Cell Reports, In and out: benchmarking in vitro, in vivo, ex vivo and xenografting approaches for an integrative brain disease modeling pipeline.