Brainmix email format

We are Dr Chris Adams and Professor Divya Maitreyi Chari, researchers from Keele University recently awarded BBSRC-NC3Rs Innovation to Commercialisation of University Research (ICURe) funding to “get out of the lab” and validate commercially promising ideas. We have been developing new representative brain models for a few years to try and improve accessibility and address some of the challenges associated with modelling the brain. For example, animal models are technically difficult, expensive, require dedicated infrastructure and have ethical issues. In vitro models tend to be too simplistic (especially when considering cell lines) or also expensive to assemble (if buying frozen primary cells or iPSC derived products). We are developing a frozen, off-the-shelf, mixed primary brain cell model which researchers can revive in their laboratory to generate representative models of the brain for their research. All the different cell types of the brain are included (neurons, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, oligodendrocyte progenitor cells and microglia [immune cells]). This is vital when modelling injury/disease where multiple cells and cell-cell interactions contribute to the pathological processes. If this is of interest to you, we would greatly appreciate it if you could tell us about the challenges you face in your current neuroscience experiments and how we might best help using our short survey here: BrainMix Survey. For further details, take a look at our landing page (BrainMix | Simple Culture for Advanced Brain Tissue Models) which also includes an explainer video and PDF. If you would like to speak with us, please send a message to either project leads: Dr Chris Adams (c.adams@keele.ac.uk) or Professor Divya Chari (d.chari@keele.ac.uk).