Director's Message:

Courtney Tindle, MS., Program Manager and Director, HUMANOID^TM Center of Research Excellence (CoRE).

"On Thursday, September 29, 2022 Senate Bill 5002, “FDA Modernization Act 2.0” was passed by unanimous and bipartisan consent. This bill changes the requisite for animal testing and allows for market approval for a new drug to use alternative methods to establish the drug's safety and effectiveness, such as organoids. Naturally, those already engaged in organoid research has been jubilant (and so are we), but we also feel the pressure to get it right because precision in disease modeling is a prerequisite before findings can be translated.

How does HUMANOID infuse rigor into disease modeling?

HUMANOID strives to ensure rigor through a 4-step approach: 1) A deep biobank that accurately captures the disease heterogeneity in the clinic (because n=1 is same as inbred mice!); 2) Cross-validate diseased patient tissues (Reality) vs. disease models (Replica) through an objective and unbiased computational assessment of the degree of "transcriptomic match" performed by our partnering Center (the Boolean Lab, at the Center for PreCSN); 3) Engage with physician-scientists and disease domain experts with knowledge in physiology and pathophysiology; 4) Stick to adult stem cell-derived organoids and primary cell based 3D models (that retain dimensionality and epigenetic information from derived tissue/milieu) and use minimalistic media (without jacking up growth factors).

HUMANOID is also a fantastic place to launch careers in stem cell biology, biomedical sciences and medicine. We are always looking for talent. For career opportunities and the lanest news, follow us on LinkedIN here."

Soumita Das, Ph.D., Former Chief Scientific Officer and Founding Co-Director, HUMANOIDTM Center of Research Excellence (CoRE).

"Each time a drug program that was successful in pre-clinical animals' models fails to reproduce efficacy in Phase III clinical trials on real-world patients, the society bears a tab of ~$ 2.4B as patients continue to suffer. HUMANOID's stem cell-based multi-dimensional disease models, reverse-engineered using co-cultures of 'all-human' patient-derived organoids, primary cells and even microbes and vetted by omics approaches for accurately recapitulating the human condition is expected to introduce an additional step in drug discovery, i.e., Phase '0' trials, which allows the testing of efficacy and toxicity of drugs so that ineffective candidates can be rejected early."  

Current affiliation: Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts-Lowell
Academic profile: Link here
LinkedIn Profile: Link here
Current role: Member, Advisory board.