Abstract

Tissue Organoids for Disease Modeling

Shay Soker, Professor, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Traditional in vitro two dimensional (2D) cell cultures fail to recapitulate the microenvironment of in vivo tissues. They have three major differences from native tissue microenvironments: substrate topography, substrate stiffness, and most importantly, a 2D rather than three dimensional (3D) architecture. In contrast, 3D human tissue organoids replicate native tissue structure and function and thus are superior to traditional 2D cultures and animal models. These organoids can be studied in vitro for several weeks to allow intensive investigations. Besides their advantages in drug toxicity testing and for development of new drugs, the human tissue organoid platform serves as a model system to explore human tissue development and disease. Our recent research was focused on the use of human tissue organoids to study liver development and congenital diseases as well as other common diseases such as tissue fibrosis and cancer. Altogether our human tissue organoids system can be used for modeling of a wide verity of diseases and develop new personalized/precision medicine applications.