New Improved Organoids

Certain drugs, even after passing all the initial safety tests and being approved for use, can cause idiosyncratic drug-induced liver injury (iDILI) – a complicated, potentially fatal form of drug toxicity wherein the drug triggers the body’s own immune system to attack liver cells. New candidate drugs can be screened for toxicity using human liver organoids – miniature clusters of cultured cells that mimic the real organ. But such screens can’t account for the immune reaction that plays a large part in iDILI. The liver organoids pictured are different. They have been co-cultured with autologous T cells (green), meaning the immune cells and organoid cells were derived from the same donor. In experiments with a drug known to sometimes cause iDILI, the new organoid co-cultures exhibited T-cell activation, cytokine (small molecules of the immune response) secretion and liver cell damage, providing proof-of-principle that the organoids will be a valuable addition to existing drug-screening tools.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Fadoua El Abdellaoui Soussi and colleagues
• Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA
• Image originally published with no restrictions – Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Advanced Science, September 2025