What if doctors could predict exactly how your body would respond to a specific treatment by modeling your immune system?
Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital and other institutions say they're a step closer to that reality after a breakthrough on a five-year research project that demonstrated immune response in organoids, or human organ tissue grown from stem cells.
Dr. Michael Helmrath is an author on that study. He says it could have implications for the treatment of diseases like IBS and celiac disease, along with other illnesses outside the intestinal tract.
"The more we can model patients in the lab specifically, the more we can test the therapies and give them the ones that are likely to work," he says.
The study, published online Thursday in the journal Nature Biotechnology, involved intestinal organoids. Those organoids were grown from pluripotent stem cells, or stem cells from mature human cells and not fetal tissue. Researchers at Children's Hospital's Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine (CuSTOM) have been doing pioneering work with organoids since 2011.
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The tiny organoids were grown in a dish for about a month, then carefully transplanted into mice whose immune systems had been suppressed and "humanized," which allowed human immune cells to function in their bodies. There, the organoids grew to be about 1 cm in size and began showing a number of cells associated with human immune systems.
"When we started this project, we did not know if implanting intestinal organoids in humanized mice would work, since it had never been done before," study author Dr. Carine Bouffi says. "When we got the first results, we saw the infiltration of immune cells in the organoids and I thought that the host mouse was rejecting the organoid. But after further analysis, we found that the immune cells were actually organized and later developed into an immune tissue comparable to a human intestine. Organoids are remarkable."
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Overall, more than 20 researchers from five institutions worked on the study. Helmrath says the results could help doctors design treatment regimens specific to a person's individual immune system.
"The promise of this research is the fact that we can start modeling human diseases," he says. "Which is the strength of using human stem cells to grow organs — they're specific to the patients who provide us the stem cells."