This organoid can menstruate — and shows how tissue can repair itself

Gynaecological disorders such as endometriosis could be studied using endometrium organoids. Credit: fizkes/Shutterstock Researchers have developed organoids that can regenerate like the endometrium, the lining of the uterus that sheds and re-forms during the menstrual cycle. The team used the miniature 3D structures to simulate rarely seen repair processes, which could inform future therapeutic strategies for tissue renewal and wound healing. The findings were published in Cell Stem Cell on 28 April 1 . The endometrium has a unique ability to repair itself after menstrual shedding without scarring, but how it does this is a mystery. Until this study, it had been difficult to replicate the activity in the laboratory and studying it in people is too invasive, says co-author Konstantina Nikolakopoulou, a molecular biologist who did the research while at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. “It is fantastic to have a model system that you can do experiments on,” says Deena Emera, an evolutionary biologist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California. Insights about endometrium repair will not only help scientists to improve understanding of gynaecological diseases such as endometriosis, but also could be relevant to regeneration research in other tissues. Lab-grown tissue Nikolakopoulou’s organoids were developed on the basis of models that her former supervisor created in 2017 2 . …