A microdroplet incubator to establish 3D organoids cultures from oesophageal adenocarcinoma

Summary

We propose to build a self-partitioned microdroplet array to grow 3d organoid cultures from oesophageal cancer biopsies. Organoids faithfully recapitulate the biology of the primary tumour and are an ideal model to test chemo-sensitivity for personalized therapies and interrogate the role of specific mutations. Currently the use of organoids is limited by the lack of standardization, poor replicability and the high cost of culture reagents. A microdroplet incubator can overcome these problems by allowing the growth of multiple organoids from the same patients on a single scaffold and microdose them with different compounds including drugs and gene editing reagents.

The Team

Gianmarco Contino (Rebecca Fitzgerald Lab, MRC-CU, Cambridge University) provides the biological expertize and reagents to design and optimize the incubator.

Ziyi Yu (Chris Abell Lab, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge) manufactures the incubator and participates to its optimization. They contribute to the design of the incubator