Researchers are creating the first organoids” from bone marrow to capture key features of human bone marrow

Researchers are creating the first organoids” from bone marrow to capture key features of human bone marrow

Scientists at Oxford University and the University of Birmingham have created the first bone marrow “organoids” that capture key features of human bone marrow. This technology, the subject of a patent application filed by the University of Birmingham Enterprise, will enable the simultaneous screening of multiple cancer drugs and the testing of personalized treatments for individual cancer patients.

A study published in the journal Cancer Discovery describes the new method, which results in an organoid that faithfully recreates the cellular, molecular and architectural features of myelopoietic (blood cell-producing) bone marrow.

The research also showed that the organoids provide a microenvironment that can accept and support the survival of cells from patients with blood malignancies, including multiple myeloma cells

"Remarkably, we found that the cells in their bone marrow organoids resemble real bone marrow cells not only in their activity and function, but also in their architectural relationships - the cell types "organize" themselves and arrange themselves within the organoids in the same way they do in human bone marrow in the body."

Dr. Abdullah Khan, Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences at the University of Birmingham and lead author of the study

This lifelike architecture allowed the team to study how the cells in the bone marrow interact to support normal blood cell production and how this is disrupted in bone marrow fibrosis (myelofibrosis), in which scar tissue builds up in the bone marrow and causes bone marrow failure. Bone marrow fibrosis can develop in patients with certain types of blood cancer and remains incurable.

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Lead study author Professor Bethan Psaila, a haematologist and research group leader at the University of Oxford's Radcliffe Department of Medicine, said: "To properly understand how and why blood cancer arises, we need to use experimental systems that are very similar to how real human bone marrow works, which we haven't really had before. It's really exciting to have this great system now that we're finally able to “We want to study cancer directly using cells from our patients, rather than relying on animal models or other simpler systems that don’t properly show us how cancer develops in the bone marrow of actual patients.”

Dr. Khan added: "This is a big step forward as it allows insights into the growth patterns of cancer cells and potentially a more personalized treatment approach. We now have a platform that we can use to test drugs based on 'personalized medicine'."

“Developing and validating the model is the critical first step, and in our ongoing collaboration we will work with others to better understand how the bone marrow works in healthy people and what goes wrong in blood diseases.”

Dr. Psaila added: “We hope this new technique will help accelerate the discovery and testing of new blood cancer treatments and bring improved medicines into clinical trials more quickly for our patients.”

Source:

University of Birmingham

Reference:

Khan, A.O., et al. (2022) Human bone marrow organoids for disease modeling, discovery and validation of therapeutic targets in hematological malignancies. Cancer discovery. doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-22-0199.

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