Innovation Showcase
The rapidly evolving field of stem cell biology is reshaping the medical landscape, offering new tools to enhance human health. At the Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine (CuSTOM) at Cincinnati Children’s, a collaborative, cross-departmental hub of excellence, we harness breakthroughs in developmental biology and pluripotent stem cell technologies to develop three-dimensional tissue structures known as organoids. These platforms enable us to improve our understanding of human biology, model patient-specific diseases in a dish, and advance personalized medicine. However, challenges persist in realizing their full potential and practical applications.
To bridge this gap, CuSTOM Accelerator (CA) was established in 2019, with a mission to translate innovations into actionable solutions, fostering synergies between academia and industry to drive the development of organoid-based drug discovery platforms and therapeutics for tissue regeneration and organ replacement. In this talk, I will elucidate our strategy for overcoming key challenges in organoid technology translation, with a keen focus on scalability, robustness, and in situ monitoring and characterization. Highlighting two pivotal organ models—the liver and intestine—I will unveil our pioneering efforts in developing fully automated AI-empowered organoid-based platforms for high-throughput drug assessment. Additionally, I will offer insights into our journey towards translating human organoids from bench to bedside, including our efforts on the establishment of cGMP-compliant scalable manufacturing of organoids in matrix-free suspension culture.