Call for Speakers 2024

In recent years organoids have advanced to prominent and versatile tools in 3R research, representing valuable alternatives for animal testing and physiologically relevant disease models at the same time. As the federal Public Health Institute, the RKI aims to establish an in-house multi-species, multi-organ organoid platform. The objective is a broad methodology in order to strengthen the Institute`s pandemic preparedness plans for novel and re-emerging pathogens, which often have to be handled in a BSL4 laboratory. So far, bronchial and nasal lung organoids have been generated from adult stem cells derived from various primary and commercial cells. Characterisation on mRNA and protein level showed that, with small variances, all organoids consist of a physiologically applicable cell composition.

One property characterizing solid tumors, is the mechanical stress. This restricts the cell proliferation, migration and invasion of weakly malignant cells, while stimulating the selection of the most aggressive clones found in a heterogeneous population. Based on this fact, we designed a new kind of artificial tumor- known as Tumor-like microcapsules- which mimic the biomechanical properties sensed by confined cancer cells in vivo. Cells cultured in these matrices show a better, faster, and stronger upregulation of most hallmarks described in neoplastic pathologies, compared to traditional cancer spheroids. Our results have been validated in vitro and in vivo (i.e. zebrafish model, mice), showing that the biomechanical stress is extremely relevant to design new strategies to culture cancer cells in 3D.