16 November | 18:30-21:00

Patient-Derived Organoid for Drug Development and Screening

Recently, a number of technological advances in stem cell biology have prompted the development of better in vitro models for biological systems. Using organoid technology, stem cell-derived human epithelial ‘mini-organs’ (organoids) can be generated from tissues of patients with various diseases including cancer and cystic fibrosis. These culture models stably maintain the genotype/phenotype of the patient’s diseased tissue, thereby representing an in vitro platform for preclinical drug discovery and validation and a tool for precision medicine.

Learning Points:

• An understanding of stem cell biology behind organoid technology
• Organoids generated from different tissues that can be used as in vitro disease models, including for genetic, metabolic and infectious diseases
• How an imaging assay using patient-derived organoids can predict patient response in diseases such as cystic fibrosis

Who Should Attend:

The course discusses the multiple aspects of organoid technology and is addressed to researchers who would like to know more about the unlimited applications of 3D organoid cultures as in vitro models for drug development, drug screening and disease modeling.

18:30 Welcome and Introduction

Mary Ann Brown, Executive Director, Conferences, Cambridge Healthtech Institute

18:40 Patient-Derived Organoid for Drug Development and Screening

Sylvia F. Boj, Ph.D., Scientific Director, Hubrecht Organoid Technology (HUB)

19:40 Coffee and Dessert Break

19:55 Patient-Derived Organoid for Drug Development and Screening

Sylvia F. Boj, Ph.D., Scientific Director, Hubrecht Organoid Technology (HUB)

20:30 Interactive Q&A with Instructor and Participants

21:00 End of Course

Instructor Biography:

Sylvia F. Boj, Ph.D., Scientific Director, Hubrecht Organoid Technology (HUB)

Sylvia F. Boj earned her Ph.D. in 2006 in Biomedicine from University of Barcelona where she performed functional genetic analysis to understand the role of the transcriptional activators HNF1A and HNF4A in the pancreatic beta cells. With a long-term EMBO fellowship, she subsequently joined Prof Hans Clevers’s team at Hubrecht Institute (Utrecht, the Netherlands) as a postdoctoral fellow. There, she first studied the role of TCF7L2 regulating metabolism, using several transgenic mouse models. Then, she established human pancreas organoids from tumor resections in collaboration with the Surgery and Pathology departments from the UMC and the group of Prof. D. Tuveson from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). In 2014, she joined foundation Hubrecht Organoid Technology (HUB) (Utrecht, the Netherlands) as group leader, leading Cystic Fibrosis and Pancreatic Cancer Programs. In 2016, she was appointed as Scientific Director of the HUB foundation, with the ultimate goal of transferring scientific advances of the organoid technology for developing drugs by interacting with pharmaceutical companies, and developing clinical trials to evaluate the predictive value of organoids for the patient-response to certain treatments.