NeuroNA Human Cellular Neuroscience Seminar // Thomas Durcan: Advancing our understanding of brain disorders with stem cells

This new seminar series, supported by the NeuroNA Foundation, informs the NeuroLéman community about progress on studies on brain development, stem cells and organoids, and mechanisms of brain and psychiatric disorders. The seminars take place alternately in Geneva at Campus Biotech (EPFL/UNIGE) and in Lausanne (CHUV/UNIL) and are also available online.

The first seminar is presented by Dr. Thomas M. Durcan, Associate Professor within the Montreal Neurological Institute (The Neuro) and McGill University and Director of the Neuro’s Early Drug Discovery Unit (EDDU). His work is focused on the use of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for fundamental and translational discovery project through partnerships with academia and industry. Founded under a decade ago, the group has established a cohort of 150+ iPSCs that have been advanced into different projects within the group and used to generate a wide range of neuronal and glial subtypes, in addition to more advanced 3D brain organoid models. For the talk, Dr. Durcan will focus on a number of case studies from the group, describing how the group develops stem cell models within a dish to model a disease on a dish. Examples will include Parkinson’s disease, Leukodystrophies and Fragile X as case studies. This work is funded through research grants from the Michael J Fox Foundation, Brain Canada, CQDM, the Canadian Institute for Health Research, the US Department of Defense (DOD) and the McGill Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives (HBHL) initiative.