Growing Organs in a Petri Dish and Starting Labs in IIT Madras | Dr Anubama Rajan

from Baylor College of Medicine. I was spearheading this research, and as a leader, to create protocols for studying coronavirus, technology called organoids, that can be grown in a dish to mimic physiology of organs. This enables scientists to do is better understand the human organ outside the human body without a need of doing clinical trial. From the lab to the market, we spend billions of dollars. More than 90% of the drug fails at clinical trial, and you're not allowed to study these pathogens in a normal lab. You need what's called as a biosafety level three. Including all this darkness, the light, the path that they showed me was so striking that I wanted to do it.

[upbeat music] Hi, this is Amrit. We are at IIT Madras, my alma mater, and India's top university for people who like to build. We are here to meet some builders, ask them: What are you building? What does it take to build? And what makes IIT Madras the best place to build? [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to the Best Place to Build podcast. Today, we are sitting with Professor Anubama Rajan. She's a faculty in the Department of Medical Science and Technology. It's a new department at IIT Madras. She's also the principal investigator, the PI, for two of the labs in the department. I'm very eager to learn about them, uh, because this is not my field. I have no idea. Um, Professor, welcome to the podcast.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Professor, let's start with this thing that I learned from your website. You are the PI for Organ-on-Chip Lab, uh, which is experimenting with mini organs on a dish. Did I get that correct?

You got it right.

Okay, so can you tell us what this lab does and, uh, maybe a little bit about the field?

Sure. So OrgAMED is organoid assisted medicine. So I work in a specific field called, uh, organoid biology. In simple terms, these are, uh, miniature stem cell models that mimic an organ, so that's where you get the idea of organs in a dish. So in about 2010, there was a group from Netherlands, and Hans Clevers was the PI of the group, and, uh, he invented this technology called organoids, which are nothing but three-dimensional bunch of stem cells that can be grown in a dish to mimic physiology of organs. So to go into details about what is the physiology, if you take a gut, for example, we know gut is involved in absorbing nutrients. They make mucus to trap microorganisms. They excrete certain things. But, uh, traditionally, when we think in biology, there are something called cell culture model system and animal model. So the cell culture model system, for a very long time, people have used cancer cell lines to, uh, mimic a specific organ. But these organoids are different because they are not cancer cell. They are derived from stem cells of a specific organ, and these stem cells are like building blocks. So you can use this to go on to reproduce the similar system outside the human body. So the mini gut in a dish do make mucus. They actually can, uh, poop out, like diarrhea. They can release fluid and swell in real time. They can absorb nutrients. So what this enables scientists to do is better understand the human organ outside the human body without a need of doing clinical trials, et cetera. And, um, why was that important? Because for a long time, people have used animal models, and essentially, you can't study a human disease in a monkey or a rat because the symptoms are very different. So they needed a more appropriate model system to better understand human disease, so that's the fundamental principle behind OrgAMED.