Skip to Content
MIT News: 77 Mass Ave

Mimicking the pancreas

Using a new type of gel, researchers have grown “organoids” from healthy and cancerous pancreatic cells.

October 26, 2021
pancreatic cells
MIT and Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute researchers have developed a synthetic gel that can be used to grow tiny pancreatic organoids, seen here, from human pancreatic cells.Courtesy of the researchers

Researchers at MIT and in the UK have developed a better way to model pancreatic cancer, one of the most difficult types of cancer to treat.

Using a specialized gel that allows cells to mimic the extracellular matrix surrounding the pancreas, the team was able to grow tiny replicas of the organ with cells obtained from human patients. These “organoids” could allow researchers to study interactions between pancreatic tumors and their environment.

Traditionally, it has been difficult to grow pancreatic tissue in a manner that replicates both cancerous cells and their environment, because once the cells are removed from the body, they lose their cancerous traits. But the new gel supports the growth of both types of tissue.

Based on polyethylene glycol, the gel is completely synthetic and can be produced easily and consistently in the lab, a challenge with some of the gels available now. It can also be used to grow other types of tissue, including intestinal and endometrial tissue. This could make the gel useful for studying lung, colorectal, and other cancers as well as endometriosis, a condition that causes the tissue lining the uterus to grow elsewhere. 

The researchers have filed a patent on the technology and are licensing it to a company that could produce the gel commercially.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.