On Mar. 9, 2021, the NIH announced that approximately two years after establishing a human cerebral organoid system to study Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), they had further developed the model to screen drugs for potential CJD treatment. The work was describe in Scientific Reports.

The lack of a completely human CJD model has been a considerable barrier hindering the discovery of potential therapies. Cerebral organoids have been used as models to study Zika virus infection, Alzheimerﾒs disease, and Down syndrome.