Demand for organoids has soared. There is a boom in development tools and several companies have emerged as “app stores” for the mass production of organoids, selling them for research and drug development. However, turning organoids into full-sized organs — along with many other promising potential applications — will require different manufacturing processes to those currently in use.

Future Horizons:

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5-yearhorizon

Collaborations ensue

Microfluidic approaches and lessons learnt from organs-on-a-chip begin to converge on standard protocols. Vascularisation begins to become more successful. Advances in throughput and standards extends how long organoids can live. Consortia lead to interdisciplinary integration. Novel tissue-culture supplies with a stronger physiological basis become more widely deployed. AI improves protocols.

10-yearhorizon

Organoid production is scaled

The transition from cell culture to bioreactors allows scalability of complex organoids. “Microphysical systems" of cells and bioreactors become standardised and ubiquitous. Solutions are found for storing, managing and sharing the massive volumes of data generated by organoid analysis, from gene expression to electrophysiology.

25-yearhorizon

Automation brings industrialisation

Organs can be created automatically and at scale. The food industry will make meat without animals, using lessons learnt from large-scale biomanufacturing, at scales large enough to be useful for food production. As a consequence, food (for humans and other species) will become more nutritious and cheaper, and can be personalised.

The varied protocols researchers use to create organoids result in highly heterogeneous organoids, and so standardisation of tools and protocols, and automated production, will be among the most important drivers of advances in this field. The creation and use of standardised organoids will increase reproducibility of results, replicability and provide the experimental control required for clinical translation. Brain organoids called assembloids now encompass hippocampus, cortex and amygdala.²⁵

This will in turn increase the ease of interdisciplinary collaboration, which could help solve lingering problems such as the difficulty of connecting different organoids to each other on a chip, or the development of realistic vascular networks rather than the microfluidic imitations currently used. Here, too, recent advances are promising.²⁶ Intestinal organoids transplanted into humanised mice have opened the way to better assimilation into chimeric hosts.²⁷

After these problems are solved, automation can scale up biomanufacturing: robotically produced organs can have nearly identical numbers and types of cells, for example. This could help with the development of bioreactors that will be necessary for the fabrication of entire organs.

Enabling technologies - Anticipation Scores

The Anticipation Potential of a research field is determined by the capacity for impactful action in the present, considering possible future transformative breakthroughs in a field over a 25-year outlook. A field with a high Anticipation Potential, therefore, combines the potential range of future transformative possibilities engendered by a research area with a wide field of opportunities for action in the present. We asked researchers in the field to anticipate:

The uncertainty related to future science breakthroughs in the field
The transformative effect anticipated breakthroughs may have on research and society
The scope for action in the present in relation to anticipated breakthroughs.

This chart represents a summary of their responses to each of these elements, which when combined, provide the Anticipation Potential for the topic. See methodology for more information.