Researchers Succeed at Generating Oligodendrocytes, Key to Myelin Renewal, in Tissue Created in Lab

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have developed a cutting-edge laboratory technique able to turn human stem cells – special cells able to grow into any type of cell in the body – into brain-like tissues in a culture dish.

They intend to use their tool to study how myelination – the deposition of myelin around nerve cells – occurs in the central nervous system, and how diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) impair this process.

The experimental protocol to grow these structures in vitro (outside an organism) is described in the study, “Induction of myelinating oligodendrocytes in human cortical spheroids,” published in the journal Nature Methods.

These structures, called “oligocortical spheroids,” are small spheres that contain all the major cell types usually found in the human brain, including oligodendrocytes — cells that produce myelin, which is the fatty substance that insulates nerve fibers. Previous cerebral organoid techniques failed to include oligodendrocytes.

“We have taken the organoid system and added the third major cell type in the central nervous system — oligodendrocytes — and now have a more accurate representation of cellular interactions that occur during human brain development,” Paul Tesar, PhD, associate professor of genetics and genome sciences at Case Western’s medical school and the study’s senior author, said in a press release.

Oligodendrocytes are essential to good brain health. Without these cells, myelin production is hampered and nerve cells cannot communicate effectively, and eventually they start to deteriorate. This is the starting point for many neurological disorders caused by myelin defects, including MS and rare pediatric genetic disorders like Gaucher disease.

Using this new organoid system and these myelin-producing cells, researchers intend to study the process of myelination — how it occurs in normal circumstances and how neurodegenerative diseases disrupt this process.

“This is a powerful platform to understand human development and neurological disease,” Tesar said. “Using stem cell technology we can generate nearly unlimited quantities of human brain-like tissue in the lab. Our method creates a ‘mini-cortex,’ containing neurons, astrocytes, and now oligodendrocytes producing myelin. This is a major step toward unlocking stages of human brain development that previously were inaccessible.”

Researchers not only demonstrated that they were capable of generating mature oligodendrocytes derived from human stem cells in vitro, but they also showed these cells were able to exert their function and produce myelin starting at week 20 in a culture dish.

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Their improved organoid system could also be used to test the effectiveness of potential myelin-enhancing treatments.

“These organoids provide a way to predict the safety and efficacy of new myelin therapeutics on human brain-like tissue in the laboratory prior to clinical testing in humans,” said Mayur Madhavan, PhD, co-first author on the study.

To prove this point, researchers treated organoids with promyelinating compounds known to enhance myelin production in mice, and measured the rate and extent of oligodendrocyte generation and myelination.

Under normal conditions, adding promyelinating drugs to cultured organoids increased the rate and extent of oligodendrocyte generation and myelin production, the team reported.

But results differed in important ways using diseased organoids.  Specifically, treating organoids generated from patients with Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease — a fatal genetic myelin disorder — brought an in vitro recapitulation of the patients’ symptoms.

“Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease has been a complicated disorder to study due to the many different mutations that can cause it and the inaccessibility of patient brain tissue,” said Zachary Nevin, PhD, co-first author on the study. “But these new organoids allow us to directly study brain-like tissue from many patients simultaneously and test potential therapies.”

Altogether, these findings demonstrate that oligocortical spheroids could be a versatile in vitro system to study how myelination occurs in the central nervous system, and a possible model for testing new therapies for neurodegenerative disorders.

“Our method enables generation of human brain tissue in the laboratory from any patient,” Tesar said. “More broadly, it can accurately recapitulate how the human nervous system is built and identify what goes wrong in certain neurological conditions.”