Why haven't organoids solved all of drug discovery?

Organoids — tissues grown from stem cells that organize themselves in three dimensions — seemed poised to upend drug development. Why test on animals or people when you could screen medications against human tissue? As Abhishaike Mahajan reports via LessWrong, the answer is reproducibility. Conventional drug development is already a disaster: ninety-nine point six percent of Alzheimer's drugs fail, and bringing one to market exceeds two billion dollars. But organoids have their own problem: Matrigel, the gelatinous growth medium secreted by mouse cancer cells. It contains eighteen hundred proteins that shift from batch to batch, and Corning, the manufacturer, won't specify whether individual proteins are more or less abundant — only the total concentration. This means every lab's organoids develop slightly differently. Alternatives to Matrigel exist but lack versatility, and testing them typically requires using Matrigel itself as a benchmark, creating a circular dependency that has stalled progress.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton