Advancing Intestinal Organoid Technology Toward Regenerative Medicine

With the emergence of technologies to culture intestinal epithelial cells in vitro as various forms of intestinal organoids, there is growing interest in using such cultured intestinal cells as a source for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. One such approach would be to combine the organoid technology with methodologies to engineer the culture environment, particularly the three-dimensional scaffold materials, to generate intestines that exquisitely recapitulate their original structures and functions. Another approach to use organoids for regenerative medicine would be to urge them to mature into functional intestines by implanting them into hosts. This process includes the tissue-engineered small intestine that uses synthetic scaffolds for tissue regeneration and direct organoid transplantation that takes advantage of submucosal tissues in the native intestines as a scaffold. Further study in these subfields could lead to the development of therapeutic options to use different types of organoids with various cell types in regenerative medicine for intestinal diseases in humans.