ORGANOIDS AS AN EX VIVO MODEL IN CANCER RESEARCH.

The organoid term is commonly used to describe ex vivo multicellular structures, which include the specific cell types of an organ and harbor its in vivo organization. These multicellular structures derive from stem cells such as adult stem cells, which have differentiation ability to generate any cell type. Early work of stem cell derived organoids performed for intestinal tissue and cortical tissue, and they showed promising capacity to organize into complex in vivo like structures. But today, organoids have been presented for various tissues such as intestine, stomach, lung, liver, prostate and brain. Therefore, they can be used to mimic developmental processes and disease states, as well as improve cell-based therapies. During the development process of organoid based studies, researchers started to work on organoids from primary tumors to understand tumor biology and solve problems on in vitro drug testing. Organoid models offer various experimental advantages for modelling cancer and understanding tumor biology, such as long term culturing, differrent tissue compartments and gene manipulation. Additionally, while organoids are very promising models to study of cancer, disadvantages arise from the lack of essential systems such as the vascular, lymphatic and immune systems; and their architecture cannot always present the organ structure as same as in vivo. Overall, organoids are important to model cancer and use them for understanding tumor biology and testing drugs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]