Intestinal organoid culture model is a valuable system to study epithelial barrier function in IBD

With great interest, we have read the article by Dotti et al,1 who analysed the transcriptional signature of epithelial organoid cultures (EpOCs) generated from patients with UC and non-IBD controls. They identified a set of genes that were differentially expressed between UC and control EpOCs, among which several were associated with epithelial secretory and antimicrobial defense. The authors further stated that the organoid culture system could serve as a model to explore the intestinal epithelium of patients with IBD. We hereby provide new support that intestinal organoid culture is also a valuable model to study epithelial barrier function, which has emerged as hallmark for IBD pathogenesis.

Although expression of genes and proteins related to epithelial junctional complex has been investigated in biopsies of patients with IBD, functional analyses of the intestinal barrier remains challenging. To this end, we established an EpOCs library from patients with remissive Crohn's disease (CD) (n=8)....

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