Brainteasers

For all our amazing progress in science, there are still surprisingly unsolved mysteries. Take multiple sclerosis (MS), a nervous system disease affecting 2.5 million people worldwide. Despite studying it for over 200 years, we still don't fully understand why MS develops. Part of the reason is a lack of high-quality lab models for MS, which limits the discoveries scientists can make. Now, researchers have built a mini-brain organoid that could unlock new insights into the disease. By comparing organoids grown from people with and without MS, they pinpointed a key difference. Compared to healthy stem cells, those from MS patients (blue) lose the ability to become a variety of different cell types (red), instead becoming neurons (green) at a higher rate. This lost ability may explain why some people with MS can't repair the damage to their nervous system. Targeting this process could help us prevent and treat MS more effectively.

April 24th – 30th is Multiple Sclerosis Awareness Week 2023

Written by Henry Stennett

Henry Stennett

Writer

Henry is a science communicator at Cancer Research UK and a freelance writer. He used to research microbiology but now he’s got the writing bug.

• Biology Open cover image from work by Nicolas Daviaud and colleagues
• Tisch Multiple Sclerosis Research Center of New York, New York, NY, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Biology Open, March 2023