Organ models and preclinical assays · Cited to primary sources · Vendor neutral
OrganoidBiofoundry

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.

Daily analysis · 57 published · How this publication works

A cerebral organoid showing self-organized layering, suspended in clear medium under cool blue clinical light.
Stem-cell-derived tissue grown to behave enough like an organ to answer a question. Illustration.

Latest analysis

August 8, 2026 The medium that reprograms your organoid drug screen
Swapping the growth-factor cocktail changed the same patient tumor organoids from drug-sensitive to drug-resistant without changing tumor identity. For organoid drug discovery, the culture recipe is an unlogged variable that can invent or erase a hit.
August 8, 2026 Mechanical strain de-matures the gut absorptive lineage
Cyclic stretch of mouse small intestinal organoids expanded immature enterocytes and suppressed the maturation program, including HNF4alpha. Adding physiological motion to gut models may lower, not raise, the absorptive fidelity that drug-absorption assays depend on.
 August 8, 2026 Building a lung fibrosis organoid from cell crosstalk
A 13 kilopascal scaffold co-culture of SFTPC-mutant alveolar cells and IPF-patient fibroblasts stiffened, contracted and grew disease-specific cell types, and returned clinic-like drug potencies. The catch is that its disease arm varies both genotype and fibroblast donor at once.
 August 7, 2026 An IPF alveolar organoid and its four-drug validation
A scaffold-based alveolar co-culture reproduces hallmarks of pulmonary fibrosis and matches clinical potencies for approved anti-fibrotics. Its predictive credential rests on a four-compound panel and statistics drawn from technical replicates.
 August 7, 2026 SImBA-SiQuAl and the measurement bottleneck in 3D screening
A free, quality-control-first pipeline turns 3D microtumour images into 29 quantitative features. It attacks the real analytical bottleneck in organoid screening, and it multiplies the number of unvalidated surrogate endpoints.
 August 7, 2026 Stromal PGE2 rewrites drug response in colorectal organoids
A single-cell CRISPR screen of the fibroblast secretome names prostaglandin E2 as the dominant stromal switch for colorectal cancer cell fate. It exposes a structural blind spot in monoculture organoid drug screens.
 August 5, 2026 Stage-specific microbiota dependence in colorectal tumor organoids
A mouse study transplants genotype-defined colon tumor organoids into germ-free and conventional hosts. Early adenomas need microbes to grow, advanced carcinomas do not, and that gradient tells you when a sterile organoid screen is trustworthy.

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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.