Human organoid biobank

The Centre provides an organoid culture and biobank facility, housed at the ICR (Chelsea). Human cancer organoids and other 3D cancer models retain important aspect of the original cancer including cellular functional heterogeneity and patient-specific differential responses to treatments, both a requirement for personalised cancer medicine. The Centre believes that organoid research can shed light on tumour cell plasticity, mechanisms of therapeutic resistance, and behaviours of circulating tumour cells as well as connect clinical research and basic research through an iterative forward and reverse-translational pipeline.

What is the purpose of the facility?

Firstly, the implementation of novel methodologies for patient-derived cancer organoid derivation, co-culture systems, transplantation and analysis.

Secondly, to provide training for EPS and cancer researchers to utilise these model systems and any methodologies our Centre develops. We wish to offer on-site training in the use and propagation of organoid cultures to engineering and physical sciences laboratories working with such systems for the first time.

Proliferating cells in a tumour organoid of triple negative breast-cancer

What are we looking for?

We focus on developing technologies and methodologies to expand the range of questions that can be addressed using cancer organoid models. We have three main scientific objectives:

To improve organoid derivation and growth. To establish new cancer organoid models and disseminate clinically annotated organoids to the ICR and Imperial research communities.

To establish novel co-cultures methods to recapitulate the tumour microenvironment, e.g. with fibroblasts and/or immune cells. Use microfluidics technology to recapitulate tumour environmental features like fluid flow, tissue mechanics and hypoxia.

To develop tools and technologies that enhance the experimental scale and throughput of organoids. Drug screening and high-content imaging allowing large-scale 3D imaging.

How to access the facility?

Access to the facility will be on a competitive basis with requests for project proposals made throughout the year with timings dependent on capacity. As with all Convergence Science Centre funding, proposals must be from cross-institution collaborative teams and use engineering/physical sciences expertise to address research or clinical questions in cancer.

Please fill this request form.

Contacts:

For enquiries, please contact Axel Behrens (a.behrens@imperial.ac.uk) or Sudeep Bhushal (sudeep.bhushal@icr.ac.uk).

To access the facility please fill this request form.