A Fuller Stomach

The video shows a human stomach assembloid, or mini stomach, made by co-culturing gastric organoids derived from stem cells from different parts of the stomach. Unlike previous single-region gastric organoids, this assembloid recreates three major regions of the stomach: the fundus, body, and antrum. Clearly, this provides a more accurate representation of an actual human stomach, with assorted gastric cell types (green, red and yellow), but that’s not the only advantage. The co-culturing also enabled crosstalk between different cell types that in turn drove the development and maturation of parietal cells (the acid producers), which have not previously been obtained in gastric organoids. Such complex functional gastric assembloids will be valuable tools for the study of various stomach diseases and treatments. Indeed, gastric assembloids created from patients with a form of inflammatory bowel disease exhibited similar gastric epithelial (the lining cells) dysfunction to that observed in the patients.

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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• Video from work by Brendan C. Jones and Giada Benedetti, and colleagues
• Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Section, Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London, London, UK
• Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, January 2026