Organoid

An organoid is a miniaturized and simplified version of an organ produced in vitro in three dimensions that shows realistic micro-anatomy. They are derived from one or a few cells from a tissue, embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells, which can self-organize in three-dimensional culture owing to their self-renewal and differentiation capacities. The technique for growing organoids has rapidly improved since the early 2010s, and it was named by The Scientist as one of the biggest scientific advancements of 2013.

Attempts to create organs ‘’in vitro’’ started with one of the first dissociation- reaggregation experiment where Henry Van Peters Wilson demonstrated that mechanically dissociated sponge cells can reaggregate and self-organize to generate a whole organism. In the subsequent decades, multiple labs were able to generate different types of organs ‘’in vitro’’ through the dissociation and reaggregation of organ tissues obtained from amphibians and embryonic chicks. The phenomena of mechanically dissosciated cells aggregating and reorganizing to reform the tissue they were obtained from subsequently led to the development of the Differential adhesion hypothesis by Malcolm Steinberg. With the advent of the field of stem cell biology, the potential of stem cells in to form organs in ‘’vitro’’ was realized early on with the observation that when stem cells form teratomas or embryoid body, the differentiated cells can organize into different structures resembling those found in multiple tissue types. The advent of the field of organoids, started with a shift from culturing and differentiating stem cells in 2D media, to 3D media to allow for the development of the complex 3-dimensional structures of organs. Since 1987, researchers have devised different methods for 3-D culturing, and were able to utilize different types of stem cells to generate organoids resembling a multitude of organs. In 2008, Yoshiki Sasai and his team at RIKEN institute demonstrated that stem cells can be coaxed into balls of neural cells that self-organize into distinctive layers. In 2009 the Laboratory of Hans Clevers at Hubrecht Institute and University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands showed that single LGR5 stem cells build crypt-villus structures in vitro without a mesenchymal niche. In 2010, Mathieu Unbekandt & Jamie A. Davies demonstrated the production of renal organoids from murine fetus-derived renogenic stem cells: subsequent reports showed significant physiological function of these organoids in vitro and in vivo.

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