Organoids: A historical perspective of thinking in three dimensions

In the last ten years, there has been a dramatic surge in the number of publications where single or groups of cells are grown in substrata that have elements of basement membrane leading to the formation of tissue-like structures referred to as organoids. However, this field of research began many decades ago, when the pioneers of cell culture began to ask questions we still ask today: How does organogenesis occur? How do signals integrate to make such vastly different tissues and organs given that the sequence of the genome in our trillions of cells is identical? Here, we summarize how work over the past century generated the conceptual framework that has allowed us to make progress in the understanding of…

• UD
  U.S. Department of Defense
• UD
  U.S. Department of Energy
• BC
  Breast Cancer Research Foundation
• MD
  Ministerio de Salud de la Nación
• IN
  Instituto Nacional del Cáncer
• NC
  National Cancer Institute