Innovation Showcase
Organoids and organotypic cultures are revolutionizing our capability to model tissues in vitro by leveraging the biological capacity of tissue-specific stem cells to generate models that closely mimic the intracellular and intercellular phenomena observed in vivo. These cultures have consequently proven valuable in diverse applications from developmental biology to evaluating antiviral effects and the toxicity of novel drugs. In addition to biological fidelity, technical characteristics such as scalability, access to both apical and basolateral surfaces, automatability, and the ability to incorporate cells from different functional lineages can be critical for being able to use stem cell-based cell cultures in impactful applications. This presentation describes novel protocols and tools, including suspension culture, culture and co-culture at the air-liquid interface, apical-out and other matrix-free methods, and variability-reducing cultureware, and reviews the benefits these adaptations have for automation, culture scale-up, increasing reproducibility and better enabling experimental measurements, including imaging.