Bile Duct Repair In Human Liver Grafts: Effective Cholangiocyte Organoid Engraftment And Plasticity

Organoid technology holds great promise for regenerative medicine, but has not yet been applied to humans. With the ground breaking paper in Science (1), by Sampaziotis and colleagues from the University of Cambridge, UK, clinical applications of cholangiocyte organoids come in sight. The authors describe how cholangiocyte organoids can be used in the context of cholangiopathies and show bile duct repair by successfully transplanting these organoids in the human liver. Using single-cell RNA sequencing, they furthermore demonstrate transcriptional diversity in primary human cholangiocytes and that this is mostly lost in organoid culture.