Organoids are self-organized 3D tissue cultures that mimic functional, structural and biological complexity of the donor tissue. Organoids are thus deemed to represent individual tumors they are derived from, but more importantly they are easier to scale up, as these are in vitro cultures, not living animals. In other words, organoids merge advantages of both cell lines and in vivo models as they are easy to work with and have a scalability similar to cell lines and preservation of original tumor characteristics similar to PDX models.
Each organoid culture is validated and characterized using whole-genome sequencing (WGS), and RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to demonstrate that the organoids are genetically and phenotypically representative of the original patient samples after long-term culture. The purpose of deep whole-genome sequencing and RNA-seq is not only model validation, but also increasing their applicability in both basic and translational research projects.
The organoids available in the collection are from patients with high-grade serous ovarian cancer tumors.
