2021 Virtual 3D Cell Culture Summit

Associate Research Scientist, Columbia University

Engineering Integrated Multi-Tissue Platforms for Modeling Systemic Human Pathologies

Bioengineered tissue platforms offer a new paradigm for modeling human pathophysiology and testing drug efficacy and safety. To model whole-body physiology and systemic diseases, we developed the biomimetic InterOrgan platform in which matured human tissues are connected in a way that allows maintaining distinct functionalities of different organs. Each tissue is cultured in its own optimized environment and integrated via recirculating vascular flow containing monocytes, by a matured and selectively permeable endothelial barrier. Tissues linked by vascular perfusion maintained their molecular, structural, and functional phenotypes over four weeks of culture, recapitulate multi-organ toxicity of doxorubicin and clinically relevant miRNA biomarkers, and show utility for immune-oncology applications. 

Chief Executive Officer
Hubrecht Organoid Technology (HUB)

Understanding Mechanisms of Disease and Identifying Therapeutic Interventions with HUB Organoids™

HUB Organoids are one-of-a-kind models that can be developed from any epithelial disease and any patient, thus bridging the gap between the lab and the clinic and effectively bringing “patients inside the lab”. Thanks to accurately predicting patient response, organoids are already been used to test drug efficacy and toxicity and predict patient response based on in vitro sensitivity data. HUB Organoids faithfully recapitulate original patient disease allowing to reduce animal usage, accelerate drug development timelines, and optimize patient selections in clinical trials, thus contributing to reducing the high attrition rate of new drugs and making personalized medicine a reality. This talk will present an overview of how HUB Organoids have contributed to understanding mechanism of human disease and have successfully predicted patient response to treatment.

Chief Scientific Officer
Hubrecht Organoid Technology (HUB)

The Landscape of Emerging Inflammatory Diseases: Lessons Learnt from Organoids

The lack of preclinical cellular models that recapitulate human inflammatory diseases is a major setback in the study of non-oncogenic conditions with an inflammatory component. HUB Organoid Technology is the only technology capable of generating in vitro models from non-transformed or non-malignant cells, which has allowed us to successfully establish organoid models and design specific assays to study conditions such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), Crohn’s Disease, Ulcerative Colitis, and COPD. This talk will present how HUB Organoids can be effectively used to model human inflammatory diseases and test novel treatment strategies.”

Young Investigator CRCN CNRS
Cancer Research Center of Lyon (CRCL), France

Counteracting Organoid Stemness Exhaustion by Controlling Stem Cell Microenvironment: On the Road to Standardization

Nowadays, stem cells (SCs) and their direct derivatives offer promising perspectives in regenerative medicine. Additionally, studying their properties, determination and plasticity turn out as determinant in understanding the development of various pathologies as dysregulation of their biology constitute the initiating step toward pathogenicity. Thanks to tremendous amount of publicly available protocols, isolating SCs is not critical anymore. Nonetheless, due to their sensitivity to microenvironmental changes, generation of organoids from SCs still remains challenging and researchers face technical issues in maintaining stemness phenotype to generate robust data. To overcome these obstacles, standard SC culture conditions still need to be further improved to gain in standardization and reliability.

In an effort to tackle these questions, we have developed a system that fine-tunes cellular microenvironment conditions mimicking optimized long term “high quality” SCs culture conditions improving therefore organoid technology reliability and performance.

Chief Scientific Officer, A:head Bio AG

Mirroring the human brain

Finding new therapies for brain diseases requires preclinical models and assays with increased clinical relevance. a:head aims to develop a human-based platform for generating complex brain-like tissue and analyzing neuronal network activity. Brain organoids are a biomedical revolution representing the most advanced in vitro experimental model of human brain. These 3D cultures mimic the structure and function of the brain with the promise of scalability to enable high-throughput screening of patient neural networks. This talk will cover our efforts toward the development of a brain organoid-based drug discovery engine.

Kilts Family Associate Professor, Director of Diabetes Program, Weill Cornell Medicine, Department of Surgery

Human Pluripotent Stem Cell-Derived Organoids for COVID-19 Disease Modeling and Drug Screening

hPSC-derived cells/organoids provide a platform to systematically evaluate the tropism and cellular response upon viral infection, which can be adapted to screen for anti-viral drugs. We assemble a large consortium team to create a panel of hPSC-derived cells/organoids to study SARS-CoV-2 tropism. By screening ten different type of cells and organoids, we found that lung, colon, heart, liver, pancreatic cells and neurons can be infected by SARS-CoV-2. Furthermore, we reported the first organoid-based screen and identified several drug candidates blocking SARS-CoV-2 entry. One identified drug, imatinib, is currently being evaluated in several phase 2/3 clinical trials globally.

Field Application Scientist
Corning Life Sciences

Spotlight: Corning® Elplasia® plates

Join Corning Field Application Specialist Constanza Curotto for an overview of Corning® Elplasia® plates, which feature microcavity technology that simplify high volume spheroid production to deliver simple spheroid formation and culture, high density production as well as uniformity, reproducibility, and consistency.

Spotlight: 3D Cell Culture Workflow

Join Corning Field Application Specialist Constanza Curotto for an overview of Corning 3D Cell Culture solutions for spheroid, organoid and tissue models.  

Assistant Professor, Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Department of Oncological Sciences, Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Pairing Comprehensive Genomics with Combination Drug Screening to Identify Mutation Specific Therapeutic Approaches

As tumors develop, tumor cells rewire their signaling and metabolic networks in order to sustain their hyperproliferative state.  In doing so they can create tumor specific vulnerabilities.  By pairing Whole Exome, Single Cell and RNA Sequencing with combination drug testing of three-dimensional organoid models our automated functional genomics pipeline works to uncover these tumor specific vulnerabilities and identify therapeutic strategies that can be evaluated in the clinic.  

Postdoctoral Fellow
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Male Sex Hormones Increase Excitatory Neuron Production in Human Cerebral Organoids

Male-female brain differences have traditionally been difficult to clearly elucidate. Yet negating the existence of biological differences has detrimental consequences for all sexes and genders, particularly for the development of accurate diagnostic tools, effective drugs and understanding of disease. The most well-established morphological difference is size, with males having on average a larger brain than females; yet a mechanistic understanding of how this difference arises remains to be elucidated. Here, we use brain organoids to demonstrate that while sex chromosomal complement has no observable effect on neurogenesis, sex steroids, namely androgens, lead to increased proliferation of cortical radial glial progenitors and an increased neurogenic pool. Furthermore, transcriptomic analysis and functional studies demonstrate downstream effects on HDAC activity and mTOR pathway, both of which are also implicated in the male-biased conditions autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. Finally, we show that androgens specifically increase neurogenic output of excitatory neuronal progenitors, while inhibitory neuronal progenitors are not increased. These findings uncover a hitherto unknown role for male sex hormones in regulating excitatory neuron number within the human neocortex and represent a first step towards understanding the origin of human sex-related brain differences.

Senior Scientist of Oncology, Head of Biobanking
OcellO B.V. Leiden, the Netherlands

High content screening in organoids; combining complex 3D biology and 3D image analysis in a high throughput 384-well format

In recent years, the number of pre-clinical advanced in vitro models that use patient-derived cultures from various tissue has increased but their full potential in drug discovery has not been fully exploited. Often current assays lack sensitive or clinically relevant endpoint measurements, or they are not suitable for high throughput screenings. Therefore, we developed a unique screening platform that combines complex 3D biology with high content phenotype-based image analysis to provide precise visualization and quantification of various novel therapeutic effects on organoids derived from healthy and diseased tissue. This advanced pre-clinical drug screening platform helps to bridge the translational gap between in vitro and in vivo studies.

Postdoctoral Associate at Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine

Characterization and Diagnostic Applications of Patient-derived Tumor Organoids

As part of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine, the Tumor Organoid Platform is an active program focused on development of 3D patient derived tumor organoids (PDTO) from metastatic and primary anatomic sites, obtained through biopsies, surgical resections and rapid autopsy procedures. In this setting, the Tumor Organoid Platform has established a “living biobank” of 160 patient tumor organoids comprising 14 different tumor types. These models are used for High Throughput Drug Screening, the identification of new targets using CRISPR Cas9 Screenings and the generation of co-cultures with different cell types present in the tumor microenvironment, including immune cells and fibroblasts.

Senior Scientist, Corning Life Sciences

Tips and Tricks for 3D Cell Culture

This presentation will cover important considerations for optimizing 3D cell culture including both scaffold and scaffold free systems. The presentation will also discuss helpful tips and tricks for handling and downstream applications including staining, imaging and protein extraction from 3D cultures.

Director, The Starr Foundation Glioma Cerebral Organoid Translational Core, Weill Cornell Medicine
 

Tackling brain tumors with a new organoid model

This session will provide an overview of how brain organoids are used to model a Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) brain tumor. Specifically, this session will cover how a new organoid GBM model has allowed for the capture of the characteristic phenotypic and molecular features of GBM in a dish. The presentation will also address fundamental questions of brain tumor development as well as how to test and exploit therapeutic vulnerabilities of this cancer in a way that cannot be achieved with traditional cell lines and animal models. 

Cell Solutions Business Operations Director

Event Host

Application Scientist
Asia Technology Center, Shanghai

3D Cell Culture and Organoids for COVID-19 Researchers

3D cell culture techniques are emerging as versatile and biologically relevant research models to help support the current fight against COVID-19. This webinar will summarize studies on organoids that were used as experimental virology platforms to study SARS-CoV-2 infectivity and immune responses, and as tools for antiviral drug discovery and development. Recent data from Corning on the characterization of airway and alveolar organoid models for COVID-19 drug screening using the Corning® Matrigel® Matrix 3D-plate and Corning Transwell® permeable support will also be presented.