Research project OrganoFeed
The OrganoFeed project intends to make lab-grown mini-organs – organoids – more reliable for research. Using AI and microfluidics, it fine-tunes the organoid environment in real time, reducing errors. This could improve drug testing and even help replace animal experiments.
The OrganoFeed project is set to transform biomedical research by making organoids—tiny, lab-grown human organ models—more reliable. These organoids mimic real human organs, offering a powerful alternative to traditional cell cultures and even animal testing. However, their growth is highly sensitive to small environmental changes, leading to inconsistent results in research and drug testing.
OrganoFeed plans to tackle this challenge by combining AI-driven predictive modeling with microfluidic technology, creating a system that adapts and fine-tunes the organoid environment in real time. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, each organoid receives personalized care, reducing errors and improving reproducibility. This breakthrough could make drug testing more accurate, accelerate medical discoveries, and reduce the need for animal experiments, bringing us closer to more ethical and effective treatments.
The full title of this research project is “OrganoFeed: Feedback-enhanced organoid maturation towards higher reproducibility for in-vitro drug testing”.
Project description
The objective of the OrganoFeed project is to leverage our joint expertise regarding microfluidic engineering and integration, and predictive algorithms development to help address a core problem in biomedical research: reproducibility. Specifically, we aim to greatly reduce the variability of organoid cultures, which otherwise hold great promise for improving both fundamental research and drug development, by shifting the paradigm from a homogenous chemical environment to individualized, data-driven feedback control.
Background
Organoids are miniaturized, self-assembled, and self-organized cellular constructs. They can recapitulate key morphology, cellular composition, and biological function of human organs, improving greatly upon the simplistic mono-cellular models used for early drug development. At the same time, organoids’ human origin avoids the species mismatch inherent to animal testing, which currently contributes significantly to poor translatability from drug candidates to human clinical trials (not to mention inherent ethical concerns).
Last but not least, being derived from individual human donors’ cell samples, organoids can be used to model both fully personalized responses as well as true population-level sampling. Organoids are, however, sensitive to even small variations in their culture conditions over the often weeks-long course of their maturation, resulting in high variability of morphology, cell composition, and function.
Current mitigation approaches have focused on providing more homogenous conditions. We propose instead an entirely different approach, based on feedback-driven control of the chemical environment at the level of each individual organoid. This ability to generate highly homogenous organoid populations should further increase organoids’ attractiveness in replacing both overly simplistic cell models as well as ethically and functionally suspect animal models with something more meaningful.
Project members
Project managers
Ioanna Miliou
Senior Lecturer
