Hospital Sant Joan de Déu will create the first live brain tissue laboratory from pediatric patients in Europe – Health and Medicine

2024-08-01 12:56:13

Research has focused so much on animal models and there are only a few centers in the world with tissue from adults.

Hospital Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona, ​​in collaboration with King’s College London, will create a pioneering laboratory in Europe to collect and preserve live brain tissue from pediatric patients. This lab will make it possible to improve research into childhood mental conditions, such as epilepsy, and will offer a platform to test new drugs.

Óscar Marín, a researcher who leads the Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at King’s College London, will coordinate this project together with the epilepsy unit and the Biobank of the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu. One of the main motivations of the initiative is to understand human brain development and cellular interactions in vivo, in addition to providing a platform to test new drugs in living material. Until now, most research in this field is based on human cells in culture or animal models that do not reflect the complexity of the human brain.

Collect and store tissue

This live brain tissue will be obtained from hospital patients with abnormalities of cortical development or brain tumors, among others, who undergo brain surgery, often with their consent. Currently, the Biobank of the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu has a collection of paraffinized and frozen specimens used by scientists to study refractory epilepsy. With the new infrastructure there will be
The 3D brain connection of the patient, which maintains its cellular architecture, that allows great precision in the study of cellular morphology, the connection between neurons and neurophysiological stimuli, as well as in the study of pathophysiological programming. It will also be possible to test different therapeutic methods that have so far been tested in animal models.

This procedure is performed in very few centers in the world with tissue from elderly patients, not pediatric patients. The platform will require the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team, including medical teams (neurosurgeons, pathologists, etc.) and laboratory teams (engineers, researchers, biobank technicians, etc.), to collect and preserve brain tissue with full assurance and can be used by the social sciences.

The clinic is set to begin operations in early 2025 and will initially focus on childhood epilepsy, although it will also explore other childhood brain diseases. In addition, it will develop a more personalized medicine, designing specific treatments for each patient through gene and cell treatments that can be performed in the same hospital, thanks to the basis of new advanced treatment methods. This project is part of the partnership presented in 2023 between the hospital and the La Caixa Foundation to promote research in rare childhood diseases. Laura Clavijo