Epithelial organoid cultures from patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease: a truly long-term model to study the molecular basis for inflammatory bowel disease?

With great interest we read the paper by Dotti et al,1 who identified a set of differentially expressed genes in epithelial organoid cultures (EpOCs) derived from patients with UC compared with EpOCs from healthy controls.

Similarly, we created an EpOC library from patients with UC (n=17), Crohn's disease (CD, n=12) and healthy controls (n=10). First, we assessed the potential of isolated intestinal crypts to grow into organoids (colony forming units). We observed that a similar percentage of organoids was formed from intestinal crypts isolated from controls and patients with UC or CD. Moreover, intestinal crypts isolated from macroscopically inflamed and non-inflamed tissue had similar potential to form organoids (figure 1A). Although we used a slightly divergent differentiation medium,2 the expansion and differentiation capacity of our organoids was similar as demonstrated by Dotti et al.

Next, we characterised the organoids through mRNA expression (quantitative...