Organoids are a powerful new enabling technology in drug discovery and genetics research.

An organoid is a 3D multi-cellular structure that, when grown in vitro, recapitulates a realistic in vivo micro-anatomy. Organoids retain multiple features of the normal tissue and pathologies associated with the human tissues from which they were originally derived. They are grown from stem cells and then cultured within a gel matrix in a proprietary bioreactor system and fed with tailored growth factors at Cellesce’s laboratories.

Organoids typically exhibit complex in vivo functions: breast cells produce milk proteins, kidney cells transport salt and water, hepatocytes express metabolic enzymes and cancer cells are invasive.

Organoids are superior to 2D cell line cultures, as they retain the tissue structure and heterogeneous cellular composition of the organ from which they were derived. Tissue-derived organoids are, therefore, closer to in vivo organs than other 3D cultures, such as ‘spheroids’, that have a less heterogeneous cellular composition.

Because organoids are closer in their tissue structure to organs than alternative research tools, they can give more relevant results in screens. Using organoids, scientists can pick and identify active compounds earlier in the screening process and weed out compounds that are more likely to fail before incurring higher downstream costs.

Up to now, the growing of 3D organoids has been a laborious manual process with considerable batch-to-batch variability and, therefore, largely confined to specialist research laboratories. The consistent growing of organoids needs to be scaled-up and become sufficiently robust before organoids can be used widely in industrial and other large scale applications, such as genetics research which requires large quantities of organoids.

Cellesce has built and validated a scalable process for the expansion of organoids, free from these historic constraints. We have a patented this invention based on our proprietary bioprocessing technology.