Stem cells from a specific organ are placed in a test tube with the right nutrition and growth factors. There the cells continue to grow in a kind of connective tissue mold. “Thanks to this mold, the cells can actually form a three-dimensional and complex structure with different essential properties of the organ from which the stem cells were taken. And so over time you end up with a kind of organ, or organoids,” explains researcher Maarten Bijlsma further in the Laboratory of Experimental Molecular Medicine at the UMC in Amsterdam.
Fourteen ORCAU laboratories
The Laboratory of Experimental Molecular Medicine has recently started a collaboration with other departments at the UMC in Amsterdam that conduct research with organoids or tumoroids. Fourteen laboratories already work together in the Organoid Center Amsterdam University Medical Centers, or ORCAU for short. Bijlsma is excited about this partnership because it prevents everyone from falling into the same traps. He thinks it’s good to learn from each other and temper expectations about organoids a bit: “This new cell culture method offers much more variation in cells than you get in the test tube.”
Organoid misunderstandings
Bijlsma warns against misunderstandings about this organ. He says that an organoid is not literally a small copy of the real organ. If you use a heart stem cell, so to speak, there won’t suddenly be a completely beating heart at the bottom of the test tube. An organoid is and remains essentially a cell culture, as we have long known it in biology.
Researchers at UMC Utrecht launched three innovative cancer studies using organoids in the middle of last year. Their research is made possible thanks to grants from the Dutch Cancer Society totaling almost 1.6 million euros.
Tumorid
To avoid erroneous associations, Bijlsma prefers to speak of “tumors” in the case of his research in the field of cancer therapy. «In our laboratory we do not grow copies of organs, but of tumors, coming from the esophagus, pancreas and also from the colon of cancer patients. So we drop different drugs on these tumoroids to see if they have an effect on the tumor in question in that patient.”
Fewer laboratory animals
Organoids and tumoroids are currently used in laboratories. This saves the lives of laboratory animals. But new drugs will have to be tested at a later stage. This is done first on laboratory animals and then also on humans. Bijlsma believes that in some cases this is exaggerated: “In some of these cases, an organoid or tumoroid can be an excellent substitute for a laboratory animal.” But there also seems to be a small problem: a tumoroid itself is not one hundred percent “animal-free”.
Bijlsma: “Even the template that we still use to grow cells into a three-dimensional structure comes from the tumor tissue of a laboratory animal. But a laboratory animal provides enough tissue to make a multitude of molds. At the end of the day, tumoroids actually save the lives of huge numbers of laboratory mice,” says Bijlsma.
2024-01-12 05:58:00
#ORCAU #bundles #work #organoids #ICThealth