Organoids will form an increasingly crucial element of personalised medicine. Drug screening for personalised medicine is already a major application in cancer therapy.²² Patient-derived tumouroids are a more precise way for clinicians to screen drugs to determine the most efficacious treatment.²³ Correlations between organoid responses and patient responses are increasing: a recent study used organoids to test growth-blocking antibodies and prevent metastasis, an approach that is going into Phase 1 trials.²⁴

Future Horizons:

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5-yearhorizon

Organoids come to the clinic

A simple organoid transplant – for example, of a retina — takes place. Other relatively thin and simple tissues move closer to the clinic. Rapid expansion and wider adoption of organoid technology for drug screening yields better understanding of human variation to drug responses, and generates predictions about how cells of the human body will respond to drugs. Drug discovery consequently gets cheaper.

10-yearhorizon

AI predicts drug responses

AI-assisted predictions can be made about individual response to some drugs. Recapitulation of actual circuits, not just cells that touch each other, is achieved. Mechanistic conduits to human mental traits are understood. Tumouroids are grown from patients to develop treatments on a very fast, highly efficient turnaround. Organoid-derived cells are used for stem-cell therapies in humans.

25-yearhorizon

High-resolution personalised medicine begins

Digitally enabled integration of genomic and environmental data for predicting personal mental biographies is achieved. Connecting the different organoids that scientists are currently developing in isolation results in miniature models of entire sections of human physiology for personalised medicine. 3D bio-fabrication of organs, including self-assembly, produces complex organs such as kidneys for transplantation.

Beyond cancer therapies, organoids could help predict toxicity of drugs and whether a drug will work given a particular individual's genetic makeup. Because they largely preserve the genetic and functional traits of the original internal organs, they are useful for diagnostic purposes and for predicting patients' responses to pharmaceuticals. Immune disorders could also be open to new investigations.

Organoids may also be the future of regenerative medicine, as bespoke organs and tissues would not be subject to the immunological or ethical complications of transplant organs. Organoid culture allows for the generation of specific cell types that were previously impossible in 2D cultures, for example, hepatocytes.

Translation and personalised organoids - 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.