Adult human ex vivo brain slices for dissecting glial biology and multicellular communication

Abstract

Glial cells are critical modulators of brain function in health, aging, and disease, emerging as promising therapeutic targets. However, exploring their roles and therapeutic potential is limited by the lack of experimental systems that faithfully capture the repertoire of mature human glial cells while permitting controlled perturbations. Here, we establish a robust ex vivo platform for cell-type specific interrogation of glial responses and multicellular crosstalk, based on adult human organotypic brain slice cultures, obtained from neurosurgical resections. We show that slice cultures preserve tissue architecture, maintain all major cell types and mature cellular identities over weeks in culture. These cultures elicit robust, stimulus-specific transcriptional programs to diverse stressors and inflammatory stimuli, demonstrating sensitivity to distinguish closely related signals and reproducibility despite biological and technical variation. Moreover, we resolved coordinated glial cell type-specific responses to TNF, a key mediator of neuroinflammation, uncovering distinct and physiologically relevant functional roles validated in postmortem human brains. Network analyses discovered balanced pro- and anti-inflammatory loops among microglia and astrocyte cells, which notably also involved oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs), confirming their suggested role in regulation of the tissue level inflammatory response in human brains. We experimentally validated that glial activation in slice cultures is orchestrated not only by direct stimulation but also through intercellular signaling across cell types, mirroring natural multicellular dynamics in brain tissue. Together, organotypic brain slice cultures emerge as a sensitive and robust platform for dissecting adult human glial biology, paving the way for deeper mechanistic insights and advanced drug-screening applications.