BREAKTHROUGH IN LAB-GROWN MINI-ORGANS SHOWS PROMISE FOR DISEASE STUDY

Organoids are mini organs grown in labs from stem cells, but which until now have lacked blood vessels. A US team has fixed that

Scientists at the University of North Texas in the United States report a breakthrough in building tiny, lab-grown replicas of human organs.

These replicas, called organoids, can mimic some functions and structures of real organs, but a key limitation in the past has been the lack of blood vessels.

The University of North Texas team, working with Stanford University in California, managed to grow mini hearts that have their own blood vessels.

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Using the same strategy, the researchers also created vascularised mini-livers.

The study, published in the journal Science in June, suggests a path towards more realistic organ models for studying disease and testing clinical therapies.

This research could also one day help tackle barriers faced in generating full organs outside the body, said Giuseppe Pettinato, director of the stem cell and organoid research lab at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, who was not involved in the study.

Organoids are grown from stem cells. Despite advances in growing organoids since the mid-2000s, there has remained the challenge of incorporating blood vessels, says Huaxiao Adam Yang, who co-authored the study.

Now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of North Texas, Yang did his undergraduate studies in chemical engineering and biological science at universities in Wuhan, China and a master's degree in macromolecular chemistry and physics at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Guiding stem cells into tissue demands precision in diet and the timing of nutrients and growth chemicals. Typically, scientists mature each cell type under its ideal conditions and then mix them together, Yang said.

But in true organs, multiple cell types develop side by side and influence each other's growth.

Yang and his colleagues focused on growing heart organoids, a project he became involved with at Stanford in 2016 and brought with him when he joined the University of North Texas in 2020.

The researchers arranged human stem cells into precise shapes using a technique that guides stem cell growth with geometric cues, Yang said.

To track the development of each cell, Yang and his colleagues added genetic tags that glowed different colours for different cell types, then fed the cells a recipe of nutrients and growth chemicals designed to help blood vessels blossom alongside heart tissue.

With that method, the researchers could watch a human heart develop in real time.

"You can see the heart beating as soon as day nine or 10," Yang said.

After about two weeks of nurturing, the researchers saw the mini hearts had built their own branching blood vessels, complete with hollow tubes, although without circulating blood.

The mini-hearts also formed the three layers of their larger counterparts and even some nerve cells.

The researchers ran tests that showed these organoids looked and behaved like human hearts about 6 1/2 weeks into pregnancy, Yang said.

To prove their recipe works for other organoids, the scientists used the same approach to grow mini-livers that developed hollow blood-vessel networks alongside various types of liver cells.

Since what Yang and his colleagues grew are technically gastruloids, or embryo-like organoids, it is unclear whether their approach will yield a mature vascularised model, according to Pettinato, who explained that a gastruloid helps us understand how the body assembles itself in the early stages of development. "But with an organoid, you have to have an actual, functional 3D structure that will mimic what is a real organ," he added.

Such organoids afford scientists a clearer view into how organs form. They can also help model diseases in human tissue and test how drugs interact with such tissue. This could accelerate drug discovery and open the doors to more personalised medicine.

Organoids are already used in preclinical research. Intestinal organoids have helped reveal how Covid-19 invades the gut.

Brain organoids are shedding light on early-onset Parkinson's disease.

Cancer organoids are being used to screen chemotherapies and match breast cancer patients to more effective treatments.

Yang acknowledges there is still work to be done to create organoids that have the same complex vasculature as those inside the body.

He hopes to replicate larger blood vessels like arteries and veins and potentially have real blood circulating through an organoid.

Another innovative avenue of research is incorporating nano materials into organoids to harness their diagnostic and therapeutic potential, such as for gene therapy, something that Yang is also looking into.

In gene therapy, organoids could be used to test a variety of drugs that compensate for faulty genes, working out the risk before testing in humans, Yang said.

If he and his team could create a system for testing any kind of therapy or treatment, he added, it could provide better guidance and confidence for clinical trials.

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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.

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2025-10-01T20:33:42Z