Thinking Beyond the Dish: Taking In Vitro Neural Differentiation to the Next Level

The past few years have seen an explosion in techniques allowing in vitro neuronal differentiation from undifferentiated cells. These include both 2D and 3D approaches such as neural rosettes, cortical spheroids, and cerebral organoids. Although these approaches have been successful in providing the first in vitro models of certain neurological disorders, they are only currently able to recapitulate very early stages of brain development. Thus, their potential to model later events and give rise to in vivo-like neuronal circuits remain uncertain.

This Workshop aims to bridge developmental neurobiology, bioengineering, materials science, and computational biology to identify and address upcoming challenges in in vitro models of the brain, including early patterning, long-term survival, vascularization, 3D-structure, and circuit assembly.

Specific aims:
1. Brain and circuit development: what can we emulate in vitro?
2. New techniques in 3D brain organoids
3. Bioengineering and materials science: patterning tissues in vitro
4. Microfluidics and vascularisation in neural tissue engineering

Technologies allowing in vitro neuronal differentiation are relatively new and still actively being developed. A bottleneck in the development of these technologies has been the difficulty to bridge basic developmental cell biology with the fields of bioengineering and tissue engineering. These areas rarely meet at existing conferences, but there is increasing recognition that to move the field forward will require multidisciplinary approaches encompassing these various disciplines. This Workshop aims to bring together a multidisciplinary team of scientists from the fields of tissue engineering, developmental neuroscience, stem cell biology, and bioinformatics to discuss emerging strategies in this field, identify common aims, and develop translational approaches.