Decellularized Tissue-Derived Materials for Organoid Culture

Organoids are self-organizing, three-dimensionally cultured embryonic stem cells (ESC), induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), or adult stem cells (AdSC) that grow in a scaffold and have cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions by which they recapitulate tissue function and architecture. During the past decade, organoid technology has made a tremendous leap forward. Organoids are useful in unraveling biological pathways, tissue engineering, and disease modeling. As they are relatively easy to initiate from small tissue biopsies, organoids hold great promise for personalized or precision medicine. Typically, organoids are grown in basement membrane extracts, derived from mouse tumor, which limits the (pre)clinical applications of organoids. Moreover, not all organs share the same matrix characteristics. Therefore, new materials to replace the mouse tumor-derived basement membrane hydrogels are essential. Decellularized tissues could be promising sources for this. This chapter describes the different approaches explored to use decellularized scaffolds for organoid support.