Facility and Technology
The BCM 3D Organoid Core streamlines the production and maintenance of various organoid lines derived from different human tissues, offering these services on demand through a centralized system. The facility encompasses over 2,000 square feet with and is staffed by extensively trained individuals who establish organoid cultures from human samples and handle routine organoid culture maintenance. Equipped with specialized incubators, a biosafety cabinet, cold storage, dissecting, and light/fluorescent microscopes, and a tabletop centrifuge, the core focuses on ensuring quality control and validation of all reagents provided to users.
The core maintains a diverse array of organoids from donors of varying ages, sexes, and ethnicities, enabling researchers to explore how these factors influence different scientific questions. The core can also generate new organoid lines tailored to specific demographic variables or disease states as required. Currently, the core boasts an extensive catalog, including healthy and diseased gastrointestinal organoids, liver organoids, healthy and diseased upper and lower respiratory organoids, vaginal organoids, endocervical organoids, bladder organoids, and skin organoids, with additional epithelial organoids under development. The core also produces media necessary for organoid cultures, with rigorous quality control, including mycoplasma testing, growth factor activity monitoring, and growth support verification through reporter assays. Technical staff are available to provide organoid cultures and appropriate media to users upon request.
Organoid lines are created from stem cells isolated from human epithelial tissues or cells collected under IRB-approved protocols with donor consent. The stem cells are liberated by enzymatic digestion, cultured in Matrigel®, and expanded in media containing growth factors to promote proliferation. Once established, each organoid line is tested for mycoplasma contamination, expanded, frozen, and stored in liquid nitrogen and becomes part of the organoid catalog of the core. Growth factors can be manipulated to induce differentiation of the organoid resulting in the mature cell types that are responsible for epithelial function. Differentiated epithelial organoids can be grown in both 3D and 2D formats, depending on the research needs. Some lines come with available genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic validation data.