Organoids are not organs: Sources of variation and misinformation in organoid biology

Abstract

In the past decade, the term organoid has moved from obscurity to common use to describe a 3D in vitro cellular model of a tissue that recapitulates structural and functional elements of the in vivo organ it models. The term organoid is now applied to structures formed as a result of two distinct processes: the capacity for adult epithelial stem cells to re-create a tissue niche in vitro and the ability to direct the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells to a 3D self-organizing multicellular model of organogenesis. While these two organoid fields rely upon different stem cell types and recapitulate different processes, both share common challenges around robustness, accuracy, and reprodu..