Fourteen labs work together in ORCAU
Organoids are complex, three-dimensional cell cultures that have become increasingly important in medical research in recent years. To prevent all research groups from reinventing the same wheel, Amsterdam UMC has now established a special center to bundle work on organoids: the ORCAU.
“Organoids are totally hot and happening!” Maarten Bijlsma, researcher in the laboratory for Experimental Molecular Medicine at Amsterdam UMC, simply tells it like it is. “Essentially it comes down to this,” Bijlsma explains. “Stem cells from a specific organ, which can still grow in many different directions, are placed in a test tube together with the right nutrition and the right ‘growth factors’. There you let those cells grow in a kind of mold of connective tissue. This mold allows the cells to truly form a three-dimensional, complex structure, with several essential properties of the organ from which the stem cells were taken. And so over time you get a kind of organ, an organoid.”
Not a literal copy of a real organ
As with everything that is ‘hot and happening’, misunderstandings also lurk here, Bijlsma warns. “You shouldn’t imagine that such an organoid is literally a minuscule copy of a real organ. If you use a stem cell from a heart, so to speak, there will not suddenly be a complete heart beating at the bottom of the test tube. An organoid is and remains essentially a cell culture, as we have known it in biology for a long time. A very complex and promising type of cell culture!”
To avoid incorrect associations, Bijlsma prefers to speak of ‘tumoroids’ in the case of his own research in the field of cancer therapy. “In our lab we do not grow copies of organs, but of tumors, from the esophagus, pancreas and also from the colon of patients with cancer. We then release different drugs on these tumoroids to see whether they have an effect on the tumor in question in that one patient.”
Before the organoids or tumoroids are used in this way in the clinic in the distant future, they are already very useful in the laboratory, Bijlsma emphasizes. “They are literally saving the lives of laboratory animals there. Sooner or later, potential new medicines will have to be tested, first on laboratory animals, later also on patients. That is usually correct, but in some cases it is sometimes exaggerated,” he says. “Assessors of scientific research still too often have the traditional reflex that they first want to see a result confirmed ‘in vivo’, i.e. in a living organism, before they give permission for publication. In some of those cases, an organoid or a tumoroid can be an excellent replacement for a laboratory animal.”
But there also appears to be a small catch: a tumoroid itself is not one hundred percent ‘animal-free’. Bijlsma: “The mold that we still use to grow the cells in a three-dimensional structure also comes from the tumor tissue of a laboratory animal. But one laboratory animal does provide enough tissue to make a multitude of molds. On balance, tumoroids do indeed save the lives of a huge number of lab mice,” says Bijlsma.
Fourteen labs work together in ORCAU
The laboratory for Experimental Molecular Medicine has recently entered into a collaboration with other departments within Amsterdam UMC that conduct research with organoids or tumoroids. Fourteen labs already work together in the Organoid Center Amsterdam University Medical Centers, or ORCAU for short. Bijlsma is enthusiastic about this partnership. “Especially with such a relatively new technology, there is a tendency for everyone to reinvent the wheel for themselves, but in the meantime they all fall into the same pitfalls. You prevent that by sharing experience.” It is also good to temper expectations regarding organoids somewhat, Bijlsma believes. “This new method of cell culture gives much more variation in the cells you get in your test tube. But at the same time, this so-called heterogeneity is also limited. These complex cell cultures are also not suddenly the alpha and omega of cancer research.”
The researcher hopes that the collaboration will not stop at the fourteen current labs. “The more experience we combine, the better.” In that respect, Bijlsma also has specific wishes. “I think there is still a lot of room for improvement if we also come up with specific recipes for other organs. For example, a pancreas consists of channels, or ‘ducts’, and ‘acinar’ cells, where the enzymes for digestion are produced. But those acinar cells cannot yet be cultured; they automatically grow into ducts in the test tube. It would be good for research into pancreatic cancer, which has an extremely poor prognosis, if we could also develop a better culture method there.”
This article previously appeared in the popular science magazine Janus. The full article is here to read.
Bron: Amsterdam UMC
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2024-01-02 11:00:12
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