The Li lab: Organoids (Video)

The Li lab at the Francis Crick Institute uses the bowel as a model to study how stem cells are programmed to maintain a healthy organ and what goes wrong when cancer develops. They are studying bowel stem cells growing in the lab in small three-dimensional clumps called organoids (also known as ‘mini-guts’). They also want to use this knowledge to grow replacement human gut tissue in the lab to use in organ transplants or for testing drugs.