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Concept
Organoid
Summary
An organoid is a miniaturized and simplified version of an organ produced in vitro in three dimensions that mimics the key functional, structural and biological complexity of that organ. 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 The Scientist names it as one of the biggest scientific advancements of 2013. Scientists and engineers use organoids to study development and diseases in the laboratory and industry for drug discovery and development, personalized diagnostics and medicine, gene and cell therapies, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
Attempts to create organs in vitro started with one of the first dissociation-reaggregation experiments 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 dissociated 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 to form organs in vitro was realized early on with the observation that when stem cells form teratomas or embryoid bodies, 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.
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood