Our research focuses on hereditary causes of gastric cancer. In particular, we're interested in hereditary diffuse gastric cancer due to disease-causing variants in either the CDH1 or CTNNA1 gene. We also investigate the role of BRCA1 and BRCA2 in gastric cancer risk and carcinogenesis.

Organoids are increasingly being utilized in a variety of research domains and gastroenterology is no exception, so with this comes a need for standardization of these techniques to generate these organoids, in particular patient-derived gastric organoids. Our protocol offers a step-by-step method to reliably generate patient-derived gastric organoids from biopsies of both the antral and body regions of the stomach. In particular, we utilize a single-cell digest approach to allow for standardized seeding of cells in an effort to make reliable comparisons amongst organoids generated from different patients.

Our findings show that compared to patient-derived gastric organoids from the body region of the stomach, those from the antral region actually grow more numerous and larger in size over the course of 20 days post initial seeding. These findings should be taken into account by researchers looking to utilize gastric organoids derived from different regions of the stomach.