Increasing physiological authenticity of human blood–brain barrier models

A research team from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Weill Cornell Medicine (both NY, USA) has utilized a transcriptomic meta-analysis to demonstrate that current induced brain microvascular endothelial cells (iBMECs) used in in vitro blood–brain barrier studies lack required functional attributes of endothelial cells (ECs), which can be alleviated by the overexpression of key ETS transcription factors. The study, which has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , demonstrated that iBMECs are deficient in vascular lineage genes while expressing clusters of genes related to the neuroectodermal epithelial lineage (Epi-iBMEC). Currently, in vitro human...