Culture of Glial Cells from Human Brain Biopsies

Surgical resections of selected human brain areas, to ameliorate intractable epilepsy, provide opportunities to isolate, maintain, and examine nonmalignant human neural cells in vitro. Because these specimens tend to be from patients of early adulthood or older, neurons do not survive the isolation process; the cells extracted are thus of glial origin, and include oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, and microglial cells. In the Yong or Antel laboratories, although the biopsy materials (frontal or temporal lobes and corpus callosum) are mostly from subjects undergoing surgery to treat intractable epilepsy, we have not found any differences in properties of cells from such surgery, when compared to cells from other types of resections, such as those used to treat cerebral cardiovascular diseases or brain trauma. In the frontal and temporal lobe resections to treat epilepsy, tissues are removed either en bloc or by Cavitron ultrasonic aspiration (CUSA), which fragments the tissue into cubes of 2 mm³ on average. Corpus callosum tissue is always removed by CUSA.