Dr. Tarun Bhatia is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Steven Sloan’s lab in the Department of Human Genetics at Emory University. He received his PhD in pharmacology from Duquesne University, under the mentorship of Dr. Rehana Leak, where he studied glial defenses in rodent models of Lewy body disorders. At Emory, Dr. Bhatia’s research continues to center on glial biology, with a specific focus on the aggressive brain tumor glioblastoma. His work aims to unravel the bidirectional crosstalk between glioblastoma tumor cells and surrounding host brain cells. To accomplish this, he transplants glioblastoma tumor cells into human iPSC-derived brain organoids and assembloids, thereby maintaining species-specific interactions in a fully human model system. Dr. Bhatia receives neurosurgically resected tumor tissue directly from the operating room and has established a method to rapidly and robustly transplant these patient-derived cells into region-specific human brain organoids to study how the unique cell types and secreted molecules in different brain regions influence tumor behavior. Dr. Bhatia participates in the newly established Brain Organoid Hub at Emory, which makes it possible for him to transplant tumor cells into dorsal forebrain (pallium), ventral forebrain (subpallium), midbrain, and spinal cord organoids all in parallel and from the same hiPSC lines and differentiations to reduce batch variability. Using imaging tools, pseudotyped rabies virus-based monosynaptic tracing, and single-cell RNA sequencing, Dr. Bhatia has thus far discovered that glioblastoma cells not only rapidly invade brain organoids, but also integrate with host neural circuitry by forming long-range synaptic connections with host organoid cells. In addition, he has discovered that these host-tumor interactions drive significant phenotypic shifts in tumor cell states and behaviors post-transplantation. In his current work, Dr. Bhatia is using computational pipelines of cell-cell communication, such as CellChat and NicheNet, to identify the specific host organoid-derived signals that influence glioblastoma progression, particularly those signals mediated through direct synaptic connections between host cells and the tumor cells. His goal is to pave the way for the development of novel, neuroscience-informed cancer therapies that disrupt host-tumor synapses while (potentially) sparing the host cells that are unconnected to tumor cells. In the future, Dr. Bhatia hopes to establish an independent research program at the intersection of neuroscience and oncology, contributing to the growing field of cancer neuroscience.