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“People in the lab would constantly say, ‘I made a hundred organoids, but I ended up with 20,’” Pasca said. That was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it suggested that researchers could stick two different kinds of organoids together—say, a tiny cerebellum and spinal cord—to study the development of more complex brain structures. Indeed, these assembloids are now a key part of Pasca’s and his colleagues’ work. On the other hand, the team still needed to be able to create large numbers of organoids so they could gather precise data on brain development, screen drugs for growth defects, or carry out any number of other projects at scale. One possibility would be to grow each organoid in a separate dish, but doing so is often inefficient. Instead, the lab needed something to keep organoids apart while growing them in batches, so Pasca worked with Heilshorn, a Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program collaborator and materials engineer, to try out some options.
The team ultimately looked at 23 different materials with an eye toward making their methods accessible to others. “We selected materials that were already considered biocompatible and that would be relatively economical and simple to use, so that our methods could be adopted easily by other scientists,” Heilshorn said. To test each one, they first grew organoids in a nutrient-rich liquid for six days, then added one of the test materials. After another 25 days, the team simply counted how many organoids remained. Even in small amounts, xanthan gum prevented organoids from fusing together, and it did so without any side effects on organoid development. That meant that researchers could keep the organoids separated without biasing their experimental results.
Now, a team of neuroscientists and engineers led by Wu Tsai Neuro affiliates Sergiu Pasca, the Kenneth T. Norris, Jr. Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine, together with Sarah Heilshorn, the Rickey/Nielsen Professor in the School of Engineering, has found a simple solution. As they reported in their study published June 27 in Nature Biomedical Engineering, all it took to keep organoids from sticking together was xanthan gum, a common food additive.
Source:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-common-food-additive-sticky-neuroscience.html
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