Morning everyone! Pleased to share a detailed protocol of our bone marrow organoid approach in @NatureProtocols : https://t.co/nh050lwgbx.

Finally finally a big thank you to everyone who has engaged with and showed an interest in implementing the system. I am hopeful that we can make big strides forward as a community as these types of systems advance. Thank you to patients + funders!

And this is the playlist : https://t.co/hUyg3cTUKH To which the paper was written for everyone out there who writes/works to very specific music.

Finally I am likely to close this account because of... well... everything... so please follow me over in @abattacks.bsky.social. If you're interested in implementing please join: https://t.co/LaqIH43hOO Where we help troubleshoot + share protocols etc.

A lot of the major therapeutic challenges and many interesting questions are around clonal evolution, chemoresistance etc. To address those well we need longer lived, 'stable' cultures - we see a decline in complexity over time in our static cultures. Watch this space!

I'll end on quoting @kellystevenslab 'It's not about how far we've come, but about how far we have left to go.' I hope you will agree this is a big step forward, but there are still challenges that I am excited to tackle (funding pending of course).

... you can build in a lot of complexity and work out strategies to retain throughput and scalability.

We present what we believe is a highly complex in vitro model that showcases the potential of human organoid systems. By adapting granular microgels pioneered by colleagues in the bioengineering field (e.g. J Burdick and others), I think we also show that...

Finally that helps us identify an inflammatory pathway (MIF) which we think underpins myeloma mediated inflammation. We show that inhibiting this in myeloma-comBO chimeroids ameliorates markers of inflammation.

We then apply this system as a pre-clinical model to study multiple myeloma - showing that we support primary myeloma cells (notoriously difficult to culture ex vivo) and capture hallmarks of their extensive interactions with bone marrow niches.

In this manuscript we address these to present comBO: a combined bone and lympho-myeloid bone marrow organoid system (I know the acronym is a bit of a reach, but it's stuck now).

(1) Capturing simultaneous lympho- and myelopoiesis in a single culture to better model haematopoiesis. (2) Generating the specialist osteoblastic niche and (3) circumventing the limitations imposed by bulk hydrogel embedding (cost, labour, scalability, automation).

On to the science! Despite recent advances in developing bone marrow organoid systems (our own work in @CD_AACR (2023) and @NatureProtocols (2024) + Frenz-Weissner paper (2024), the major challenges (as we see them) remained:

And of course @beth_psaila for all the support (and patience...). A big thank you to the whole HSCB lab for all the support which most often manifests as pranks/coffee/donuts...

... it can still be fun so a huge thank you to everyone who made it so. In particular shout out to @YuqiShen_ without whose support it would have been impossible to do this. @DrSarahGooding for gentle guidance and excellent collaboration into the myeloma world.

First and foremost, a huge thank you to all co-authors. This has been a tricky project to pull together having moved twice + juggling demands of grant writing/trying to set up a research group. With the support of lovely people in an excellent environment @MRC_WIMM ...

Good morning everyone, I'm pleased to share our latest advance in bone marrow in vitro modelling: https://t.co/2Sa2lAGkeD

This was fun (if a bit daunting at first ) - big thanks to Ben and Tasha et al. For making it a fun experience !

On Radio 4 TODAY - Listen to @AbAttacks from the @MRC_MHU talking about how organoid research could help develop better treatments on the latest episode of Best Medicine 🧫 6:30 pm on Radio 4 or online now! https://t.co/hMhZeRdMgl

Kick off the new year with cutting-edge science. Join the NIC, Prof. Christoph Klein and @abattacks for their webinar on "Organoids" happening on Wednesday, 8 January 2025! https://t.co/t4Sj7KUugv

(@Subsumido apparently Antonio does have a twitter handle, I am negligent and will apologise via cake)