Did you know: UC San Diego HUMANOID™ Center

How can HUMANOID™ add translational relevance to your program?

This invaluable resource, developed through strong partnerships with UC San Diego clinicians, is accessible to the campus community via services. It includes a comprehensive organoid biobank, spanning healthy, cancerous, pre-cancerous, fibrotic, metabolic, and immune diseases. HUMANOID™ also stands ready to collaborate on grants as the leading expert in organoid research, offering tailored experiments and specialized organoid training. To further support your research, we provide voucher programs for aligned projects to generate preliminary data for your grant proposals, empowering your groundbreaking work. In the past 3 years, we have worked with over 50 principal investigators across campus and other universities. Take a look at our metrics below.

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Therapeutic Testing & Stressor Exposure:
Tailor your experiments with precise treatments using a variety of therapies or stressors to simulate real-world conditions and test drug efficacy.
RNA, DNA & Supernatant Isolation/Collection:
Isolate and collect vital genetic material and supernatants, ensuring high-quality samples for your most critical research.
Functional Assays for In-Depth Analysis:
Proliferation: Monitor cell growth with Ki67, BrdU-ELISA, or MTT assays.
Apoptosis: Accurately detect cell death using Annexin V.
Cytotoxicity: Evaluate cell viability with powerful assays like LDH, Zombie Viability Kit, and LIVE/DEAD Viability Kit.
DNA Damage: Assess genomic stability with Gamma-H2AX and track oxidative DNA/RNA damage with our specialized plate-based kits.
Senescence: Investigate cellular aging and longevity with SA-β-gal
Expert Training Modules:
Master the essentials of stem cell isolation, passaging, freezing, and monolayer culture with our comprehensive, hands-on training. We empower your team with the skills to achieve consistent, high-quality results.
Specialized Media Solutions:
Organoid Media: Achieve optimal growth with our benchmarked organoid media—Intestigro, Stomagro, and Lungbrew.
Ancillary Media: Ensure long-term success with our tailored media—Orga-Freeze, Tailor-2-Gro, and Tissue-2-Go.
Personalized Consultation:
Gain invaluable insights from our experts with bespoke consultation services. We offer strategic guidance to refine your organoid research, optimize protocols, and troubleshoot challenges, ensuring your experiments reach their full potential.

Our innovative systems offer submerged and air-liquid models using both TC plates and transwell inserts, enabling unparalleled flexibility in experimental design.

Barrier Function Assessment: Monitor TEER (Trans-Epithelial Electrical Resistance) and paracellular permeability (via FITC-Dextran and Cascade Blue) to assess baseline and post-therapy responses, giving you insight into cellular dynamics and therapy impact.

Stress and Therapy Treatments: Test the effects of various stressors or therapies on your monolayers, enabling deep understanding of treatment responses.

Co-Culture Systems: Seamlessly integrate with bacterial (probiotic and pathogenic), viral, human immune, and mesenchymal cells to model complex biological interactions in a controlled environment.

Transform your research with our PDO-derived monolayers, where many of the functional endpoint assays listed above are fully supported and optimized for your needs!

Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Over 350 unique Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis subjects; many lines come with corresponding myofibroblasts from the same subject. Selected lines have undergone comprehensive phenotype, genotype, and transcriptome analyses. All lines feature thorough metadata, encompassing patient demographics, clinicopathologic behavior, histology reports, treatment information, and, where applicable, patient response.
Hereditary Cancer (Predisposition) Syndromes: Familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP), juvenile polyposis syndrome (JPS), Lynch syndrome (HPNCC), and Peutz-Jeghers syndrome (PJS). Includes repeat biopsies from the same subjects for longitudinal studies and multiple organ locations in some subjects, such as colon, small intestine, gastric, and esophageal tissues. All patient-derived organoids come with pathology reports and insights into their diagnosis-defining mutation.
Foregut Diseases (pre-cancer): Barrett’s esophagus, eosinophilic esophagitis, gastric intestinal metaplasia, GERD, as well as healthy controls.
Lung Inflammation, Fibrosis, and Cancer: Several unique subjects, some of whom have matching tumor and normal organoids. PDO lines have been extensively characterized for retaining all 5 epithelial cell types in culture, essential for modeling alveolar diseases. These lines are valuable for studying lung inflammation (COVID-19, bacterial), lung fibrosis, the effects of anti-fibrotic therapies using EVs and small molecules, and immunotherapy impact. Information includes smoker status but not tumor genotype.
Cancer Patient-Derived Organoids (PDOs): Several cancer PDO lines, representing various cancers (colon, biliary, pancreas, gastric, and esophagus). Some of these are from the ATCC, the Broad Institute and Columbia University. These lines are available for researchers to conduct organoid-based cancer studies, emphasizing our motto, we bank, so that you can avoid the hassle and just focus on your planned studies!".

Test Hypotheses: Use human organoids to validate your research ideas and push boundaries.
Drive Discoveries: Tap into our cutting-edge models to uncover new treatments, novel biomarkers and even therapeutic interventions (small molecules, antibodies, CRISPR/RNA interference).
Test Drug Toxicity & Efficacy: Get precise results that could accelerate your journey from the lab to real-world applications.

Schedule Services Now: iLab Organizer :: The Institute for Network Medicine (ilabsolutions.com)

So, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with the UC San Diego HUMANOID™ Center today and let’s redefine the future of drug discovery together! 🚀

Stay curious, stay innovative, and let's create a healthier world! 🌍