Can next-generation disease modelling personalise 21st-century medicine?

Advances in foundational technologies have enabled scientists to engineer biological systems, placing medicine on the front foot against its most difficult challenges. Stem cell research is reshaping how diseases are understood and treated, driving healthcare towards more targeted approaches.

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) are human cells that are genetically programmed to behave like embryonic stem cells. Organoids, which are three-dimensional tissue models grown from these cells in a laboratory, could usher in a new age of personalised and regenerative medicine.

A hiPSC can transform into nearly any type of human cell, making them valuable for modelling vital organs in medical studies and replicating biological processes that normally occur inside the body. Mohamed Ahmed Jamal, dean of the Hamdan Bin Mohammed College of Dental Medicine at Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences (MBRU) in the United Arab Emirates, says hiPSCs and organoids bridge the gap between conventional cell cultures and animal testing: “They allow researchers to study human development, disease mechanisms and therapeutic responses in a way that was previously impossible, opening new opportunities for personalised medicine and regenerative therapies.”

This holds significant prospects for medical science. Organoids can accelerate drug development, enabling researchers to evaluate safety and efficacy ahead of clinical trials. “This can reduce development costs, improve success rates and potentially decrease reliance on animal testing,” says Jamal. It also presents new ways to model disease in patients.

Researchers can now create patient-specific hiPSCs and organoids that carry the patient’s genetic background, enabling them to study neurodegenerative disorders, cancer, cardiovascular disease and inherited conditions in more detail. In the future, organoids may offer regenerative treatment pathways for patients with degenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease.

However, there are practical challenges, such as scalability, ensuring standards and ethical considerations. There is more to learn about organoid-based technologies before they are used in everyday clinical settings. “Organoids often lack the full complexity of human organs, including vascular systems, immune components and interactions with multiple tissues,” Jamal says. “Variability between organoids can also affect reproducibility, and long-term maturation remains difficult for many tissue types.”

Advances in bioengineering and AI are accelerating scientific understanding of organoids and how these challenges might be overcome. “The future of this field will depend on strong interdisciplinary collaboration,” says Jamal. MBRU’s integrated research and healthcare ecosystem, which is part of Dubai Health, offers a strong foundation for advancing this work through world-class infrastructure, knowledge base and collaborative institutional culture.

For example, its Dubai-BioCHIP initiative combines hiPSC-derived organoids, organ-on-a-chip technology, advanced biofabrication and AI to develop disease modelling, drug screening and precision medicine. “The project brings together expertise from stem cell biology, tissue engineering, biomaterials science, clinical medicine and computational sciences, reflecting the type of collaborative ecosystem needed to advance this field,” says Jamal.

Find out more about Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences.