Intestinal Organoids Cultured with Collagen Achieve About 80% Success Rate Even with Ulcerative Colitis Patient Cells (Institute of Science Tokyo)

Explanation

On August 7, 2026, a research team led by Lecturer Tomohiro Mizutani of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences, Institute of Science Tokyo, announced a method for stably culturing "intestinal organoids" of treatment-grade quality from patients' own cells.

Intestinal organoids are small tissues that reproduce the structure and function of the intestine by growing a patient's cells in a test tube; since their development in 2009, they have advanced research into digestive diseases. However, it has been considered difficult to create organoids from patients with ulcerative colitis, whose intestines are inflamed. The research team used highly safe collagen as the culture material and succeeded in culturing organoids even from cells derived from these patients, achieving a high success rate of about 80%.

Furthermore, using the small, stable peptide molecule PG-008 in place of proteins that are difficult to handle enabled stable culturing in all cases of cells derived from ulcerative colitis patients, and also improved the efficiency of expansion. It was shown for the first time that these organoids are rich not only in the stem cells that normally maintain the intestine, but also in special stem cells that appear only when the tissue is injured and help with repair.

Being able to study the function of these stem cells is expected to bring researchers closer to elucidating the mechanism by which the intestine heals wounds and to realizing regenerative medicine using patients' own cells.

Published paper: DOI 10.1186/s13287-026-04995-6