Preservation of glial cytoarchitecture from ex vivo human tumor and non-tumor cerebral cortical explants: A human model to study neurological diseases

For the human brain, in vitro models that accurately represent what occurs in vivo are lacking. Organotypic models may be the closest parallel to human brain tissue outside of a live patient. However, this model has been limited primarily to rodent-derived tissue. We present an organotypic model to maintain intraoperatively collected human tumor and non-tumor explants ex vivo for a prolonged period of time (similar to 11 days) without any significant changes to the tissue cytoarchitecture as evidenced through immunohistochemistry and electron microscopy analyses. The ability to establish and reliably predict the cytoarchitectural changes that occur with time in an organotypic model of tumor…