Pancreatic Organoids: A Frontier Method for Investigating Pancreatic-Related Diseases

The pancreas represents an important organ that has not been comprehensively studied in many fields. To fill this gap, many models have been generated, and traditional models have shown good performance in addressing pancreatic-related diseases, but are increasingly struggling to keep up with the need for further research due to ethical issues, genetic heterogeneity and difficult clinical translation. The new era calls for new and more reliable research models. Therefore, organoids have been proposed as a novel model for the evaluation of pancreatic-related diseases such as pancreatic malignancy, diabetes, and pancreatic cystic fibrosis. Compared with common traditional models, including 2D cell culture and gene editing mice, organoids derived from living humans or mice cause minimal harm to the donor, raise fewer ethical concerns, and reasonably address the claims of heterogeneity, which allows for the further development of pathogenesis studies and clinical trial analysis. In this review, we analyse studies on the use of pancreatic organoids in research on pancreatic-related diseases, discuss the advantages and disadvantages, and hypothesize future trends.