Multicellular constructs

Over the last few years, there has been a shift towards the use of three-dimensional multicellular structures that more closely recapitulate native tissues and organs as tools to understand development, physiology and pathology.

Automated extrusion-based bioprinting has been shown to enable human kidney organoid generation with improved throughput, quality control and scale, representing an important step towards macro-scale kidney tissue engineering.

An immune cell population enriched in inflamed gut tissue is shown to play a role in driving CD44⁺ intestinal organoid proliferation, while also regulating extracellular matrix deposition and remodelling in a synthetic hydrogel platform.

Extrusion-based bioprinting has been shown to rapidly and reproducibly generate kidney organoids from a cell-only paste, with the number and maturation of functional units within the kidney tissue capable of being further improved by bioprinting tissue sheets.

Type-1 innate lymphoid cells have been shown to drive intestinal epithelial proliferation and extracellular matrix remodelling through TGF-β1 secretion, which could exacerbate inflammatory bowel disease comorbidities such as cancer and fibrosis.

This Review provides an overview of bioengineering technologies that can be harnessed to facilitate the culture, self-organization and functionality of human pluripotent stem cell-derived organoids.

This Review highlights approaches used to generate somatic cell-derived organoids for modelling epithelial tissue to understand disease progression and how they are employed in preclinical drug screening.

This Review highlights the recent emergence of stem-cell-derived embryo models for the purpose of advancing our understanding of mammalian embryology as well as their potential uses in regenerative and reproductive medicine.

A 3D bioprinting approach has been developed to facilitate tissue morphogenesis by directly depositing organoid-forming stem cells in an extracellular matrix, with the ability to generate intestinal epithelia and branched vascular tissue constructs.

Tissue mimics are of great interest in understanding diseases. Here, organoids were developed that resemble polycystic kidney disease cysts and it was demonstrated how material environment and adhesion can affect cystogenesis and disease progression.

A method to accelerate the generation of kidney organoids from human pluripotent stem cells cultured in a three-dimensional environment and exposed to inductive stimuli has been developed, with the organoids capable of recapitulating kidney organogenesis.