New 3D Cortical Tissue Models Incorporate Microglia to Bridge Preclinical Translation Gaps

28bio today announced CNS-3D Inflammatory Organoids, designed to evaluate efficacy of anti-inflammatory drugs by quantifying their ability to reduce inflammatory injury, preserve tissue health, and restore neuronal network activity.

Anti-inflammatory therapies in CNS diseases, particularly in neurodegeneration, have extremely high failure rates due to the poor clinical translational of conventional models, such as animal systems and 2D cell cultures, which do not accurately replicate human neuroimmune interactions, inflammatory signaling, or functional neural network disruption.

CNS-3D Inflammatory Organoids are the only commercially available assay-ready immunocompetent 3D brain organoid model incorporating neurons, astrocytes, and microglia for functional evaluation of inflammation-driven neural injury and anti-inflammatory therapeutic response in a human cortical tissue model.

Neuroinflammation is one of the most important and least translatable areas of neurological drug development. For the first time, researchers can simultaneously measure inflammatory signaling, cellular response, tissue injury, and functional neural disruption within the same biological context."

Christopher Butt, PhD, Vice President of Technology, 28bio

CNS-3D Inflammatory Organoids recapitulate hallmarks of neuroinflammation through administration of pro-inflammatory stimuli such as TNF-α, LPS, and IL-6. Functional calcium imaging can be combined with cytokine analysis, immunostaining, cytotoxicity assays, and molecular profiling to generate multidimensional insights into neuroimmune biology and therapeutic response.

"Researchers now have a more predictive model to evaluate neuroimmune biology and anti-inflammatory therapeutics," said Stuart Gibb, Head of Business Development at 28bio. "CNS-3D Inflammatory Organoids are available as assay-ready products in 24-, 48-, 96-, and 384-replicate formats or services beginning in Q3'26."

Following the recent launch of CNS-3D Myelinated Organoids, this announcement marks another step toward building a comprehensive human-relevant assay for modeling disease pathogenesis and functional recovery in neurodegenerative diseases.