Building Tissue Niches for Regenerating Physiologically Functional Human Islet Organoids from Human Pluripotent Stem Cells

Creation of highly organized multicellular constructs, including tissues and organoids, will revolutionize tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. The development of these technologies will enable the production of individualized organs for patient-tailored organ transplantation or individualized tissues for cell-based therapy. These lab-produced high order tissues and organs can serve as disease models for pathophysiological study and drug screening. We have developed innovative tissue assembly technologies for generating pancreatic islets from human pluripotent stem cells (HPSCs). These islets exhibited a tissue architecture similar to human pancreatic islets, consisting of pancreatic α, β, , and pancreatic polypeptide (PP) cells. We discovered that tissue scaffolding is critical to the generation of pancreatic endoderm and the assembly of islet architectures.