Create organoids from amniotic fluid cells, key to curing diseases

Deciphering embryonic development is essential to understanding and curing diseases. diseases that will afflict us for the rest of our lives, and science has just taken a giant step towards this understanding thanks to the creation of organoids of mother cells obtained from the amniotic fluid of 12 fetuses.

Organoids are simplified and realistic versions of organs, they are produced in vitro through the cultivation of stem cells and they help scientists understand the real organs they simulate.

In the study, published this Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, a multidisciplinary team of researchers has generated organoids of multiple types of tissues (lung, kidney or intestine) from the culture of cells collected during the last weeks of pregnancy in fluid samples. amniotic fluid (the fluid that surrounds and protects the fetus as it grows).

New cell source

This is the first time that this new cellular source, amniotic fluid obtained through minimally invasive sampling in the last phases of pregnancy, has been used for the generation of organoids.

Until now, the creation of these organoids for prenatal research had been carried out from fetal tissues collected postmortem through biobanks and under great ethical-legal restrictions.

But this time, the researchers were able to obtain samples of human amniotic fluid epithelial cells collected during prenatal studies in 12 pregnancies between weeks 16 and 34.

Thanks to single-cell sequencing, the authors characterized the nature of each cell, and were able to isolate stem cells of gastrointestinal, kidney and lung origin.

How a fetal organoid is created

To explore whether these cells could be used to create organoids, scientists ‘they sowed’ in the laboratory and observed that they began to proliferate and self-organize into three-dimensional organoids, which were visible in just two weeks.

They found that the cells formed primary fetal organoids from specific tissues in areas of the human body, such as the small intestine, kidney and lungs, and that they presented functional characteristics of that tissue of origin from which they came.

In this way, for example, they were able to use this technique to generate lung organoids from amniotic fluid stem cells of fetuses affected by congenital diaphragmatic hernia and observe how this pathology was formed.

This rare disease, which some babies develop in the first months of pregnancy, creates a hole in the diaphragm, from which significant complications can arise.

“Our findings offer an alternative method of generating fetal organoids, which could be fundamental to better understand the later stages of development during pregnancy and to achieve advances in research into congenital anomalies,” one of the authors, the researcher at University College London, Francesco Mattia, stressed at a press conference.

Heal during pregnancy

Mattia has highlighted that this study opens the way to the creation of “Fetal organoids during ongoing pregnancies for the development of personalized therapies against multiple pathologies.”

We are before “a new approach to modeling congenital pathologies” through the generation of human organoids from this new cell source, stressed Nuria Montserrat, ICREA Research professor at the Institute of Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in a reaction collected by the Science Media Center Spain platform.

The study “describes how organoids of the small intestine, renal tubules and lungs are expandable and can functionally mature with great potential for regenerative medicine and personalized disease modeling,” stated Iván Fernández Vega, scientific director of the Biobank of the Principality of Asturias (BioPA), on the same platform

“This advance would allow the study to be carried out in ongoing pregnancies, being able to provide real-time solutions in the future, with analysis during pregnancy, which could potentially lead to more personalized and effective treatments.”