Organoids – Impact Lab

Breakthrough Thinking, Medical Breakthrough, People Making a Difference

They Bleed, Therefore They Live: Mini Organs Just Crossed the Threshold of Life

August 1, 2025

For years, mini organs—organoids—have been stuck in a paradox. We could grow them. We could watch them twitch, pulse, and mimic the basic behaviors of hearts, brains, livers, and lungs. But they couldn’t survive long enough to matter.

Why? Because they didn’t bleed.

Without blood vessels, these lab-grown miracles died from the inside out—hollow promise at the core. Now, two groundbreaking studies have rewritten that fate. Scientists have finally cracked the code to vascularize organoids, breathing life into what were once biological shadows.

Biotech, Coronavirus, Healthcare, Science & Technology News, Stem cells

Artificial ‘mini-lungs’ grown in a lab allow scientists to watch how the coronavirus infects human cells in ‘major breakthrough’

November 1, 2020

Tiny artificial lungs grown in a lab from adult stem cells have allowed scientists to watch how coronavirus infects the lungs in a new ‘major breakthrough’.

Researchers from Duke University and Cambridge University produced artificial lungs in two independent and separate studies to examine the spread of Covid-19.

Researchers took stem cells and had them grow into cells found in the lungs
They then had them produce 3D models of the lung cells Covid-19 infects
They can use their new models to track the spread of the deadly virus in lungs
It’s hoped doing so will allow them to develop new drugs to help treat the virus

Continue reading… “Artificial ‘mini-lungs’ grown in a lab allow scientists to watch how the coronavirus infects human cells in ‘major breakthrough’”

2020 Predictions, Biotech, brains, Energy, Healthcare, Science & Technology News

The major discoveries that could transform the world in the next decade

January 2, 2020

Here’s what scientists are really excited about.

The last decade ushered in some truly revolutionary advances in science, from the discovery of the Higgs boson to the use of CRISPR for Sci-Fi esque gene editing. But what are some of the biggest breakthroughs still to come? Live Science asked several experts in their field what discoveries, techniques and developments they’re most excited to see emerge in the 2020s.

Continue reading… “The major discoveries that could transform the world in the next decade”

Automation, Robotics, Stem cells

Robots can grow humanoid mini-organs from stem cells faster and better than people

May 23, 2018

Automated robots now have the tools to grow imitation, simplified human organs out of stem cells. Thankfully, we weren’t transported to a sci-fi dystopia where the machines have risen up and started to farm humans, but rather a world where pharmaceutical and other biomedical research just became much easier and faster.

Give these robots some pluripotent stem cells (stem cells that can become any type of cell), and 21 days later they’ll have finished a complicated experiment testing out the effects of a drug or genetic manipulation on some human-like, lab-grown kidneys. According to research published yesterday, May 17, in Cell: Stem Cell, the process is much faster and more reliable than when humans grow the same mini-organs.

Continue reading… “Robots can grow humanoid mini-organs from stem cells faster and better than people”