NIH Establishes Organoid Modeling Center

The National Institutes of Health recently awarded $87 million in contracts to establish the Standardized Organoid Modeling (SOM) Center, which aims to leverage the latest technologies to enable real-time optimization of organoid protocols.

Organoids are small, lab-grown tissue models that replicate the structure and function of human organs, offering an alternative to animal research models, but many organoid models face reproducibility challenges.

The SOM Center aims to address these challenges by developing standardized protocols using artificial intelligence, robotics and diverse human cell sources. The SOM Center will make its protocols, data and organoids openly available. It will focus initially on models of the liver, lung, heart and intestine.