First of a kind in-vitro 3D neural tissue model

The first author, Gelson Pagan-Diaz-Diaz, likens the produced tissue to a computer processing unit, which provided the basic principle to today's supercomputer. Pagan-Diaz is a graduate student in Prof. Rashid Bashir's group in the Department of Bioengineering at the Grainger College of Engineering. Bashir is also the Dean of the College. "Being able to form 3-dimensional tissue consisting of neurons can give us the ability to develop tissue models for drug screening or processing units for biological computers," Pagan-Diaz said. The brain is challenging to study in an actual person, but being able to understand how these networks develop using a 3D model outside the body promises to give researchers a new tool to better understand how it works.