Neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease are hard to study due to the complexity of the human brain, the difficulty of substituting native tissues with functional, in-vitro models and the challenges of obtaining human specimens.

3D bioprinting offers a new way for scientists to create 3D models that can overcome these hurdles, but finding suitable biomaterials that can accommodate neurons in 3D is not easy.

In a notable achievement at Charlotte Hauser’s laboratory in KAUST, postdoc Sherin Abdelrahman has established 3D models of brain organoids based on 3D scaffolds composed of ultrashort self-assembling peptides that contain nothing more than four amino acids.

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