Stanford Psychiatry’s Sergiu Pasca Receives NIH MERIT Award

We are pleased to announce that Stanford Psychiatry’s Sergiu Pasca, the Kenneth T. Norris, Jr. Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program, has received a special grant for outstanding investigators from the National Institute of Mental Health to continue research gaining insight into psychiatric disease by engineering in vitro brain models over the next 10 years.

NIH’s Method to Extend Research Time (MERIT) Awards are designed to provide long-term grant support to investigators “whose research competence and productivity are distinctly superior and who are highly likely to continue to perform in an outstanding manner.” As such, this award will extend research support for an ongoing project.

The inaccessibility of human brain tissue at the molecular and cellular level has hindered therapeutic development for psychiatric disorders. Dr. Pasca’s laboratory has developed neural organoids mimicking specific brain regions from stem cells and pioneered neural assembloids to study interneuron migration and circuit formation. However, in vitro models lack the in vivo interactions and inputs necessary for complex neuropsychiatric disease modeling. This grant will focus on generating assembloids within the in vivo rodent cortex to enhance neuronal maturation and behavioral readouts. Specifically, they will expand transplantation models and establish transplanted forebrain assembloids, characterize their integration and functionality, and apply this model to study severe neurodevelopmental disorders caused by genetic mutations.

“The slow pace of progress in understanding brain disorders is partly due to a lack of access to live neurons from patients for detailed investigation by imaging, recording, and stimulation,” says Dr. Pasca. “We will build the next-generation, in vitro organoid models of human brain function by including neural projections that release modulatory molecules. We plan to use this novel system to understand issues in communication between brain regions in genetic neurodevelopmental disorders and to identify means to address them.”

Dr. Pasca leads the Pasca Lab, seeking to understand the rules that govern the assembly of the human brain and the molecular mechanisms that lead to neuropsychiatric disease. To achieve this, the laboratory has pioneered and applied neural organoid and assembloid technologies to make discoveries in fundamental and clinical neuroscience. Recent publications related to this work include “Human assembloid model of the ascending neural sensory pathway” published in Nature. Dr. Pasca also directs the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program that pioneers new approaches to study human brain development and shares broadly and freely technologies developed at Stanford. 

More Information

Read more details about the project on NIH RePORTER.