Growing miniature organ-like tissues in the lab is already within our reach. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a new approach that enables intestinal mini-organs to be grown more easily and efficiently in the lab. This holds immense promise for regenerative medicine.

In a study published in November in Cell Reports Methods, researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) reveal that applying a few specialized lab techniques yields intestine-like tissues of predictable size and composition.

Organoids are organ-like balls of cells that are grown in the lab from spheroids (even smaller balls) of human cells and mimic the properties of the organ from which the “seed” cell was taken. Organoids are used for studying organ function in a lab setting and are also promising tools in the field of regenerative medicine.

Aging inevitably increases the risk of disease, as exemplified by CAD, AD, and cancer. Monitoring the aging process and understanding its mechanisms will not only enhance early diagnoses, it may also provide strategies for the early prevention and treatment of diseases. While biomarkers for cellular senescence in in vitro cultured mammalian cells are already well-defined, those that define in vivo senescence/aging at the systemic level remain scarce. Here, we generated a targeted Glb1^+/m allele at the Glb1 locus that encodes β-galactosidase. The GAC signal indicates Glb1 level. The results reveal that the live-imaged GAC signal is linearly correlated with chronological age, but only in middle-aged mice (9–13 months). High GAC at the MA stage was associated with cardiac hypertrophy and shortened lifespan. Moreover, GAC signal was exponentially increased in pathological lung fibrosis induced by BLM. Thus, this in vivo reporter mouse can faithfully monitor systemic aging and organ functional decline in a manner closely associated with lifespan, and provides an ideal system for studying aging mechanisms and developing anti-aging manipulations.

The upregulation of p16^Ink4a transcription and elevated SAβ-gal staining are both well-established and widely used biomarkers for cellular senescence¹⁷, and the former led to the generation of live-imaging aging reporter mice^20,22,23. Intriguingly, high level of p16^Ink4a, indicated by luciferase activity, predicts cancer initiation rather than lifespan. Similarly, the in vivo application of SAβ-gal as a senescence marker at the tissue level is also limited. Positive SAβ-gal-staining is easy to obtain in kidney and adipose tissue sections but difficult to obtain in blood vessel and heart sections. By SAβ-gal staining, not many positive cells were detected in old individuals²⁶. It raises the question of whether SAβ-gal labels in vivo senescence or if the percentage of in vivo senescent cells is indeed very low.