The Saurat Lab focuses on understanding the cellular mechanisms that regulate ageing in the brain and how these processes contribute to the progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. We program age into neurons, astrocytes and microglia derived from human pluripotent stem cells, creating advanced 2D and 3D models — including organoids and microtissues — to study the aged human brain in a dish. By combining these models with powerful tools such as single-cell transcriptomics, inflammatory cytokine profiling and functional assays, we investigate how cellular ageing and neuroinflammation disrupt brain cell function and alter signaling between neurons and glia with the ultimate goal of identifying new molecular targets to treat age-related neurodegenerative diseases.
Group Members
Research Themes
- Programming age into pluripotent stem cell derived neurons and glia.
- Modelling Alzheimer’s disease progression in a dish using 2D and 3D models.
- Decoding cell–cell communication and inflammatory signaling in the ageing brain
Featured Publications
| Authors | Title | Published In |
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Nathalie Saurat, Andrew P Minotti, Maliha T Rahman, Trisha Sikder, Chao Zhang, Daniela Cornacchia, Johannes Jungverdorben, Gabriele Ciceri, Doron Betel, Lorenz Studer |
Cell Stem Cell, 2024, 31 (8), 1162-1174. e8 |
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Chao Zhang, Nathalie Saurat, Daniela Cornacchia, Sun Young Chung, Trisha Sikder, Andrew Minotti, Lorenz Studer, Doron Betel |
bioRxiv, 2023.07. 03.547539 |
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Sudha R Guttikonda, Lisa Sikkema, Jason Tchieu, Nathalie Saurat, Ryan M Walsh, Oliver Harschnitz, Gabriele Ciceri, Marjolein Sneeboer, Linas Mazutis, Manu Setty, Paul Zumbo, Doron Betel, Lot D de Witte, Dana Pe’er, Lorenz Studer |
Nature Neuroscience, 2021, 24 (3), 343-354 |
More Publications
| Authors | Title | Published In |
|---|---|---|
Tae Wan Kim, So Yeon Koo, Markus Riessland, Fayzan Chaudhry, Benjamin Kolisnyk, Hyein S Cho, Marco Vincenzo Russo, Nathalie Saurat, Sanjoy Mehta, Ralph Garippa, Doron Betel, Lorenz Studer |
TNF-NF-κB-p53 axis restricts in vivo survival of hPSC-derived dopamine neurons |
Cell 187 (14), 3671-3689. e23 |
Arianna Baggiolini, Scott J Callahan, Emily Montal, Joshua M Weiss, Tuan Trieu, Mohita M Tagore, Sam E Tischfield, Ryan M Walsh, Shruthy Suresh, Yujie Fan, Nathaniel R Campbell, Sarah C Perlee, Nathalie Saurat, Miranda V Hunter, Theresa Simon-Vermot, Ting-Hsiang Huang, Yilun Ma, Travis Hollmann, Satish K Tickoo, Barry S Taylor, Ekta Khurana, Richard P Koche, Lorenz Studer, Richard M White |
Developmental chromatin programs determine oncogenic competence in melanoma |
Science 373 (6559), eabc1048 |
Sarah Kishinevsky, Tai Wang, Anna Rodina, Sun Young Chung, Chao Xu, John Philip, Tony Taldone, Suhasini Joshi, Mary L Alpaugh, Alexander Bolaender, Simon Gutbier, Davinder Sandhu, Faranak Fattahi, Bastian Zimmer, Smit K Shah, Elizabeth Chang, Carmen Inda, John Koren 3rd, Nathalie G Saurat, Marcel Leist, Steven S Gross, Venkatraman E Seshan, Christine Klein, Mark J Tomishima, Hediye Erdjument-Bromage, Thomas A Neubert, Ronald C Henrickson, Gabriela Chiosis, Lorenz Studer |
Nature communications 9 (1), 4345 |
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Nadja Zeltner, Faranak Fattahi, Nicole C Dubois, Nathalie Saurat, Fabien Lafaille, Lei Shang, Bastian Zimmer, Jason Tchieu, Mohamed A Soliman, Gabsang Lee, Jean-Laurent Casanova, Lorenz Studer |
Capturing the biology of disease severity in a PSC-based model of familial dysautonomia |
Nature medicine 22 (12), 1421-1427 |
Nathalie G Saurat, Frederick J Livesey, Steven Moore |
Cortical differentiation of human pluripotent cells for in vitro modeling of Alzheimer’s disease |
Systems Biology of Alzheimer’s Disease, 267-278 |
Iain C Macaulay, Wilfried Haerty, Parveen Kumar, Yang I Li, Tim Xiaoming Hu, Mabel J Teng, Mubeen Goolam, Nathalie Saurat, Paul Coupland, Lesley M Shirley, Miriam Smith, Niels Van der Aa, Ruby Banerjee, Peter D Ellis, Michael A Quail, Harold P Swerdlow, Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Frederick J Livesey, Chris P Ponting, Thierry Voet |
G&T-seq: parallel sequencing of single-cell genomes and transcriptomes |
Nature methods 12 (6), 519-522 |
Steven Moore, Lewis DB Evans, Therese Andersson, Erik Portelius, James Smith, Tatyana B Dias, Nathalie Saurat, Amelia McGlade, Peter Kirwan, Kaj Blennow, John Hardy, Henrik Zetterberg, Frederick J Livesey |
APP metabolism regulates tau proteostasis in human cerebral cortex neurons |
Cell reports 11 (5), 689-696 |
Nathalie Saurat, Therese Andersson, Navneet A Vasistha, Zoltán Molnár, Frederick J Livesey |
Neural development 8, 1-14 |
