Source：eMedClub News

In 2009, Hans Clevers et al. created the first intestinal organoids using adult stem cells from the mouse gut, ushering in an era of organoid research. Since then, the field of organoids has continued to emerge some excellent research results, and organoid technology is also rapidly achieving breakthroughs.

On a global scale, organoids have become a battleground for multinational pharmaceutical companies. After 2015, more than 20 multinational MNC companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, Sanofi, Bristol-Myers Squibb, etc. entered the market through the purchase of products, cooperative authorization and investment, which promoted the commercialization process of organoid technology.

01 Organoid technology multi-point flowering

In recent years, the organoid industry has ushered in rapid development in a variety of sounds and under the disturbance of multiple factors. From the US FDA's approval of Sanofi's new application for the use of organoid efficacy data, to the contrarian financing of industry representative enterprises, all show that the organoid industry has entered a new stage of development. During this time, there have also been many advances in various types of organoids.

The first is the intestinal organoid, and since Hans Clevers developed the first intestinal organoid model using mouse stem cells in vitro, many researchers have achieved further breakthroughs in this field. In February 2022, Meghan M. Capeling's team successfully constructed intestinal organoids by using alginate and suspension culture of stem cells, which were more realistic than the mesenchymal tissues of traditional intestinal organoids. In October 2022, the Sunghee Estelle Park team improved the spatial structure of traditional organoid media and launched OCTOPUS, a modular organoid culture platform, which optimized the way of nutrition delivery based on traditional three-dimensional culture. The team then used the OCTOPUS platform to build a patient-derived organoid model of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

The second is brain organoids. The development of human brain in vitro model is one of the hotspots of organoid research. The current brain organoids model has made great breakthroughs in terms of shape, maturity and practical application. In May 2023, Simon T. Schafer's team constructed a mouse model of transplanted human brain organoids, providing a potential research platform for neuroimmune disorders such as autism. In December 2023, Guo Feng's team published a paper in the journal Nature Electronics, introducing a hybrid computing system composed of electronic devices and brain organoids. The system has the ability to perform many tasks such as speech recognition and nonlinear equation prediction.

Third, the related research of liver organoids has also made a lot of progress. Because liver organoids have a good prospect in the field of toxicology detection and organ transplantation of drug poisoning patients, this field is also a research hotspot. In August 2019, Muhammad Nadzim Bin Ramli et al. published a paper introducing the newly developed liver organoid platform, which contains a variety of substantial hepatocyte types and liver structures, and can simulate complex liver diseases. In February 2023, Hans Clevers' team introduced a novel human organoid model for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and FatTracer, a technology platform for screening potential targets for NAFLD, to accelerate target screening and application.

Research on cardiac organoids has exploded in recent years, with the human heart being the first functional organ formed during development and one of the most difficult to model. In 2021, the scientific research team of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna successfully cultivated the world's first extrinsic self-organizing heart organoid model through the human iPSC. In May 2023, researchers from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, successfully created the first "miniature heart" with stem cells similar to the heart of an early human embryo. In November 2023, Sasha Mendjan's team developed the first multi-chamber heart organoid model, which includes all the major cardiac development structures, and the establishment of this type of organ model will help advance the development of heart disease drugs and toxicology research.

02 Organoids have broad prospects but also face many challenges

In general, after years of accumulation, organoid technology has ushered in an outbreak in recent years, its application scope is also broader, and the practical application effect has also been significantly improved. The application areas of organoids can be broadly divided into medical research (including physiological research and pathology research), drug development (early stage research and clinical research), precision medicine and regenerative medicine.

By modeling development and disease through organoids, researchers can model human development and disease through organoids to discover potential targets and identify novel biomarkers. In addition, the use of organoids for clinical trials is also one of the current technological development trends, and organoids trials are expected to improve the precision of clinical trial patient recruitment, thereby reducing the failure rate of clinical trials and controlling the cost of clinical trials.

Patient-derived organoids are also proving to be valuable diagnostic tools in precision medicine applications, where organoid technology can help patients with rare genetic mutations test efficacy and screen for cancer combination therapies. Finally, there is a serious shortage of donors and immune rejection in organ transplantation, and organoids have a broad prospect in the field of organ repair and transplantation. Although organoid technology shows great commercial value and advances rapidly, it still faces many challenges. Including organ phenotype, low reduction of human system, lack of standardization, supervision needs to be further improved. To realize the commercial value of organoid technology, it is necessary to overcome the problem of insufficient standardization. At present, there is too much human participation in the process of organoid culture, and it is difficult for the academic community to reach a unified standard, which brings obstacles to commercial application.