The Evolving Role of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells and Cerebral Organoids in Treating and Modeling Neurosurgical Diseases

Over the past decade, the use of induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs), as both direct therapeutics and building blocks for 3D in vitro models, has exhibited exciting potential in both helping to elucidate pathogenic mechanisms and treating diseases relevant to neurosurgery. Transplantation of IPSCs is being studied in neurological injuries and diseases, such as spinal cord injury and Parkinson's disease, whose clinical manifestations stem from underlying neuronal and/or axonal degeneration. Both animal models and clinical trials have shown that IPSCs have the ability to regenerate damaged neural tissue. Such evidence makes IPSCs a potentially promising therapeutic modality for patients who suffer from these neurological injuries/diseases. In addition, the cerebral organoid, a 3D assembly of IPSC aggregates that develops heterogeneous brain regions, has become the first in vitro model to closely recapitulate the complexity of the brain extracellular matrix, a 3-dimensional network of molecules that structurally and biochemically support neighboring cells. Cerebral organoids have become an exciting prospect for modeling and testing drug susceptibility of brain tumors, such as glioblastoma and metastatic brain cancer. As patient-derived organoid models are becoming more faithful to the brain, they are becoming an increasingly accurate substitute for patient clinical trials; such patient-less trials would protect the patient from potentially ineffective drugs, and speed up trial results and optimize cost. In this review, we aim to describe the role of IPSCs and cerebral organoids in treating and modeling diseases that are relevant to neurosurgery.