Abstract

Traumatic brain injury confers a significant and growing public health burden and represents a major environmental risk factor for dementia. Previous efforts to model traumatic brain injury and elucidate pathologic mechanisms have been hindered by complex interactions between multiple cell types, biophysical, and degenerative properties of the human brain. Here, we use high-intensity focused ultrasound to induce mechanical injury in 3D human pluripotent stem cell-derived cortical organoids to mimic traumatic brain injury in vitro. Our results show that mechanically injured organoids recapitulate key hallmarks of traumatic brain injury, phosphorylation of tau and TDP-43, neurodegeneration, and transcriptional programs indicative of energy deficits. We present high-intensity focused ultrasound as a novel, reproducible model of traumatic brain injury in cortical organoids with potential for scalable and temporally-defined mechanistic studies.