Organ models · Drug discovery
Organoid Biofoundry
A publication about growing human tissue that behaves enough like an organ to answer a question. We cover the models, the assays built on them, and the reproducibility problems that decide whether any of it reaches a clinic.
Latest analysis
July 28, 2026 Why a PDAC organoid alone hides CA19-9 immunosuppressionIn a mouse model, the CA19-9 glycan actively drives immunosuppression through a Fbln3 to EGFR to IL1a and TGFb axis. The target is invisible in tumor-cell-only organoids and appears only when mesothelium and T cells are added back.
July 28, 2026
Does your lung organoid carry the right HOX code?
A new map places the adult human lung HOX code mostly in stroma, not epithelium. iPSC lung organoids reproduce much of it but add posterior HOX genes the adult lung never expresses.
July 28, 2026
Retinal organoids as a photoreceptor manufacturing source
Human iPSC retinal-organoid photoreceptors survive six months, take on cone identity and wire into a mouse retina, with younger cells integrating best. The functional evidence is real but limited, which reframes the organoid as a therapy product with its own validity rules.
July 27, 2026
When a mutation's signature is noise, not a shift
A 16p11.2 deletion iPSC model increases gene-expression variability between cells rather than only shifting the average. That changes what a valid disease model and a valid drug screen for this genotype look like.
July 27, 2026
Glioblastoma organoids that grow their own synapses
A new human organoid transplant model gives glioblastoma cells working synapses and shows that blocking them reroutes tumor cell fate. It also exposes what tumor-only drug screens cannot see.
July 27, 2026
When the tumor, not the donor, sets the immune tone
In humanized mice, the engrafted tumor, not the immune-cell donor, decides which immune cells infiltrate it. That result reframes which questions belong to organoids and which to living models.
July 26, 2026
The two-step cell-fate switch behind pulmonary fibrosis, seen in a human alveolar organoid
A human AT2-fibroblast organoid study reconstructs the epigenetic switch that turns alveolar stem cells into fibrosis-associated basal cells with age. It hands drug discovery staged targets and a pointed safety warning: a HIF-stabilizing drug already in the clinic induced the same pathological marker.
Start here
Standing explainers that do not go stale. Read the primer first if this field is new to you.
The primer
What is an organoid?
The biology behind the models: how a stem-cell-derived 3D tissue is grown, quality controlled, and read out, and where the resemblance to a real organ stops.
Model
Brain organoids
Self-organized cortical-like tissue: what develops, what does not, and why maturation is the binding constraint.
Model
Liver organoids
Metabolic and toxicological readouts, and how far they predict human hepatotoxicity.
Model
Kidney organoids
Nephron-like structures, off-target cell types, and what that means for injury models.
Constraint
The vascularization problem
Why organ models stop growing at a millimetre, and the approaches trying to get past it.
Sections
Section
Organ models
Each model reproduces some of an organ and omits the rest. These pages set out what is faithfully modelled, what is missing, and which questions the model can therefore be trusted to answer.
Section
Drug discovery
Patient-derived models, tumour screening, and high-throughput assays that have to survive a real pipeline.
Section
Analysis
Daily readings of new research, each asking what the work changes for this field.
How we work
We report what a model was validated against, not what it was advertised to do. Sample sizes, donor counts and passage numbers matter for reproducibility, so we quote them where the source does and note their absence where it does not. Preclinical results are reported as preclinical: an effect in a dish is not an effect in a patient, and we do not blur that line to make a headline. The full method, including how pieces are selected and produced, is on the about page.