All posts tagged: Organoids

The Download: rise of the robots, and what organoids can teach us

The Download: rise of the robots, and what organoids can teach us

Published by skeptic

—This is an excerpt from a new book, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, by MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus  Robots are an incredible way to enhance and extend the reach of human capabilities. In 2009, I worked with the biologist Roger Payne to use camera-mounted drones to study whales and their life spans.  The same drone was used to study uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, so they could be observed without the risk of bringing germs to people who had not developed immunity.  We also built a drone that launched from a self-driving car, flying ahead and around corners to relay its video back to the car’s navigation system. We can already pilot our eyes around corners and send them soaring off cliffs. But what if we could extend all of our senses to previously unreachable places, and throw our sight, hearing, touch, and even sense of smell to distant locales and experience these places in a more visceral way? The possibilities are endless—and endlessly exciting. Read the full extract …

Organoids made from uterus fluid may help treat fetuses in the womb

Organoids made from uterus fluid may help treat fetuses in the womb

Published by skeptic

Balls of cells grown from amniotic fluid. The red indicates lung stem cells Giuseppe Cala, Paolo di Coppi, Mattia Gerli Babies born with serious medical conditions could one day get better diagnoses and treatments while in the uterus, thanks to a new technique that involves taking samples of cells from fluid in the uterus and growing them in a dish. In a world first, Paolo De Coppi at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and his colleagues have shown that fetal cells from amniotic fluid can be coaxed into forming miniature balls of lung, kidney or small intestinal tissue. They also showed these lung organoids could potentially help guide the treatment of babies born with a sometimes-fatal lung condition called congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH). The technique hasn’t yet been used to treat any children, but the results show that is possible in principle, says De Coppi. It could also be modified to help in various other congenital conditions in a strategy the researchers call “personalised prenatal medicine”. The idea exploits a recent approach in which …

Organoids made from amniotic fluid will tell us how fetuses develop

Organoids made from amniotic fluid will tell us how fetuses develop

Published by skeptic

Researchers have known for decades that amniotic fluid holds fetal cells. That’s what allows doctors to diagnose conditions like Down syndrome and sickle-cell disease before birth via amniocentesis, in which a needle is used to take a sample of the fluid. The vast majority of these cells, 95% or more, are dead cells sloughed off by the fetus, says Mattia Gerli, a stem cell biologist at University College London and an author of a paper on the work published in Nature Medicine today. But what the researchers homed in on was the much smaller fraction of live cells in amniotic fluid. First, they worked to determine what kinds of cells were there, mapping their identities and then using single-cell sequencing to assess where they originated. Next, the team placed three kinds of progenitor cells—kidney, lung, and small intestine—in a 3D culture to see if they would form organoids. “We’re just taking them as they are and putting them into a droplet of gel. This is very low tech,” coauthor Paolo De Coppi, a pediatric surgeon …