Cost-Reduction Strategy to Culture Patient Derived Bladder Tumor Organoids

Organoids as an aggregation of stem cells can recapitulate the function of organs in miniature form and have developed great potential for clinical translation, drug screening and personalized medicine over the last decade. Most organoids are currently cultured in basement membrane matrices (BMMs), which is hampered by xenogeneic origin, batch-to-batch variability, cost and complexity. In addition, organoid culture relies on biochemical signals provided by various growth factors in the composition of the medium. We have developed a method for culturing organoids from bladder tumors in a sodium alginate hydrogel scaffold in addition to fibroblast conditioned medium (FCM)-enriched culture medium that is inexpensive and easily amenable to clinical applications. Tumor organoids in Alginate and FCM based medium grow in comparable to those cultured in BMMs and standard medium. The organoids express specific bladder organoid markers containing CK14, CK20, LGR5, Uroplakin III, FOX1A, GATA3, CK5 and CK44 and the proliferation potential showed by confocal microscopy. The results indicate that alginate is very promising for early passage human bladder organoid culture with increase the scalability potential. Furthermore, using FCM based medium as an alternative solution can be consider, especially for low-resource situation and to develop cost effective tumor organoids.