Last week was a good week for neuroscience. Boston Children’s Hospital received nearly $2.2 million from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC) to create a Human Neuron Core. The facility will allow researchers at Boston Children’s and beyond to study neurodevelopmental, psychiatric and neurological disorders directly in living, functioning neurons made from patients with these disorders.

“Nobody’s tried to make human neurons available in a core facility like this before,” says Robin Kleiman, PhD, Director of Preclinical Research for Boston Children’s Translational Neuroscience Center (TNC), who will oversee the Core along with neurologist and TNC director Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD, and Clifford Woolf, PhD, of Boston Children’s F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center. “Neurons are really complicated, and there are many different subtypes. Coming up with standard operating procedures for making each type of neuron reproducibly is labor-intensive and expensive.”

Patient-derived neurons are ideal for modeling disease and for preclinical screening of potential drug candidates, including existing, FDA-approved drugs. Created from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) made from a small skin sample, the lab-created human neurons capture disease physiology at the cellular level in a way that neurons from rats or mice cannot. …