Patient-derived organoids for therapy personalization in inflammatory bowel diseases

Figure 1 Intestinal organoid in inflammatory bowel disease research: The future of precision medicine. Patient-derived intestinal organoids are three-dimensional in vitro cell structures derived from stem cells that differentiate and self-organize into functional intestinal epithelium-specific cell types. For this reason, this model is suitable for different research approaches useful to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) modelling and to study current and new therapeutic options. By retaining the disease-specific phenotypic defects, intestinal organoids can be employed to study epigenetic and transcriptomic profiles. In addition, the ability of intestinal organoids to differentiate into all the different cell types present in the intestinal epithelium makes this model useful to discover new cell-specific disease mechanisms. Furthermore, organoids can be used to study cytokine-induced apoptosis and to test currently used drugs to better understand their mechanisms. Co-culturing intestinal organoids with either microbiota components or immune cells helps to investigate IBD pathogenesis. Thanks to all these research approaches new pharmacogenomic biomarkers, new therapeutic targets and new drugs could be discovered, enabling the development of precision medicine for IBD patients. The image was created with https://biorender.com/.