Sant Joan de Déu is developing a lab for studying living brain tissue from paediatric patients

Since 2014, the renowned neuroscientist Óscar Marín has been leading the Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at King's College London, where he studies human brain development. He will direct this new living brain tissue laboratory, where six researchers will start working in early 2025. The team will work closely with King's College researchers to develop and optimise all experimental techniques to the highest quality standards.

For Marín, Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona Children's Hospital is the perfect setting to drive this research from the earliest ages and create a collaborative laboratory. "One of the main motivations behind this ambitious project is to understand how human brain development works by studying its properties. So far, much of the research in this field relies on human cell cultures or animal models, and while they are very useful, they do not reflect the complexity of the human brain". The new laboratory will give researchers access to living paediatric brain tissue, crucial for advancing the understanding of human brain development.

How will the samples be obtained?

The brain tissue will be obtained from patients at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital who undergo brain surgeries, always with their consent. During these surgeries, it is often necessary to remove healthy tissue to access tumours located in deep layers of the brain, and these will be the samples studied in the laboratory.

These surgeries are rarely performed on paediatric patients because they require extensive collaboration between medical teams (surgeons, neurosurgeons, pathologists, etc.) and laboratory teams (researchers, biobank technicians, etc.). To facilitate this, Sant Joan de Déu has developed a new procedure that involves various departments to ensure the tissues are obtained and preserved with the highest standards.

Study of paediatric brain disorders

One of the focus areas will be childhood epilepsy, a brain activity disorder that appears in many rare diseases and still has an unknown origin.

Additionally, the lab will explore other paediatric brain conditions and help develop a more personalised medicine. This will include designing specific treatments for each patient through gene and cell therapies, which can be produced in-house at the hospital, thanks to the new Advanced Therapies Platform.

One of these conditions will undoubtedly be gliomatosis cerebri, a diffuse brain tumour with a poor prognosis. Its study is being carried out in collaboration with associations like Izas, la Princesa Guisante. A few years ago, Share4Rare and the association collaborated to create a medical book dedicated to this disease.

*Source: The first living pediatric patients brain tissue laboratory in Europe