RIKEN Symposia: Integrated organoid science: Stem cells, engineering, medicine

We are pleased to announce that the 2020 RIKEN BDR-CuSTOM Joint Virtual Symposium “Integrated organoid science: Stem cells, Engineering, Medicine,” will be held online on November 4 to 6, 2020. This symposium is to replace the one cancelled in March this year due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The discovery of the self-organization processes in stem cell culture systems has enabled researchers to generate three-dimensional mini-organs or so-called "organoids" in the lab, and has consequently propelled stem cell research into a new dimension, with applications in human developmental biology, drug discovery for rare diseases as well as in vitro analyses of inter-organ connections. Recent improvements in organoid culture technologies have been achieved through interdisciplinary researches between wide-ranging fields including biomaterial engineering and microdevice technologies, in addition to basic stem cell biology. The organoids being generated, however, are still small and immature, and there remains a need to understand the basic principles of the self-organization phenomena as well as develop breakthroughs in culture technology to generate mature functional organs. This symposium will bring together scientists from fields of stem cell biology, engineering, chemistry and information science to share the latest cutting-edge research in organoid biology and its social implementation, and also discuss the future tasks of this research area.

2020 RIKEN BDR-CuSTOM Joint Symposium Virtual