Gregor Dederichs

Project Summary:

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is prevalent and complex neurological disorder, characterised by a spectrum of cognitive, social, and communicative challenges first manifested in early childhood. Unique to every patient, ASD has a strong genetic basis, with hundreds of rare and common genetic variants identified to date. However, direct links between genetic disruptions and behavioural manifestations remain poorly understood, notably because of lacking experimental models of the developing brain.

Here, the emergence of organoid technologies offers a promising research alternative, thanks to their ability to recapitulate, in vitro, some of the structure and function of the tissue they model. In the case of neuropsychiatric disorders, this offers an unprecedented access to study the development of neural tissue – a unique tissue with the ability to form cellular networks capable of high-level computation.

To better understand the formation of these networks, my project characterises the underlying structure of network dynamics in healthy and diseased dorsal forebrain organoids. More generally, the project aims to explain electrophysiological mechanisms and hallmarks of the disorder, assay how pharmacological compounds affect neurological activity, and, I hope, help establish brain organoids as relevant models in translational neuroscience.