Human assembloid model of the ascending neural sensory pathway

Somatosensory pathways convey crucial information about pain, touch, itch and body part movement from peripheral organs to the central nervous system1,2. Despite substantial needs to understand how these pathways assemble and to develop pain therapeutics, clinical translation remains challenging. This is probably related to species-specific features and the lack of in vitro models of the polysynaptic pathway. Here we established a human ascending somatosensory assembloid (hASA), a four-part assembloid generated from human pluripotent stem cells that integrates somatosensory, spinal, thalamic and cortical organoids to model the spinothalamic pathway. Transcriptomic profiling confirmed the presence of key cell…