News on the organ donation and research front

As transplant surgeons, organ procurement organizations (OPOs), and regulators work to increase the number of donated organs that can be transplanted, more patients have the potential to benefit. This is an important and lifesaving goal.

At the same time, there is another opportunity to consider: how can we maximize the medical value of donated organs that are not suitable for transplant?

These donated organs can provide researchers with something that is difficult to replicate – a direct opportunity to study living human tissue. The discoveries made through this research may ultimately contribute to new treatments for diseases affecting millions of people.

One emerging technology that could help extend the research value of each donated organ is precision-cut tissue slices (PCTS).

Precision-cut tissue slices are very thin, carefully prepared sections of an organ or tissue. Unlike a traditional cell culture, where individual cells are removed from their surrounding environment, PCTS preserves much of the tissue’s original structure.
This is important because cells do not function in isolation. In the human body, cells interact with neighboring cells, structural proteins, blood vessels, and other components of the tissue. Together, these elements create an environment that influences how cells behave.

PCTS can preserve many of these important features, including:

• Multiple types of cells found naturally within the tissue
• The extracellular matrix, the structural framework surrounding cells
• Cell-to-cell interactions
• Important aspects of the tissue’s original architecture
• In viable tissue, functioning cells that can respond to experimental treatments

In simple terms, a PCTS can give researchers a small but remarkably representative piece of a human organ, allowing them to study how that tissue responds under controlled laboratory conditions.

Earlier applications of tissue-slice technology often focused on animal tissue or tissue that had been frozen or chemically preserved. These approaches remain useful, but advances in tissue recovery, preservation, and slicing are opening new possibilities. Researchers can now work with fresh, viable human tissue obtained from donated organs. That distinction matters.

When tissue remains viable, researchers can observe how living human cells respond to drugs, disease processes, or other interventions. Rather than relying solely on isolated cells or animal models, researchers can study biological responses within actual human tissue. This can potentially improve the translatability of research—the likelihood that findings observed in the laboratory will also be relevant to human patients.

For researchers and drug developers, this is particularly important as the scientific and regulatory communities place increasing emphasis on human-relevant models that can generate meaningful data earlier in the development process.

The applications for precision-cut tissue slices continue to expand. Some of the most promising areas include:

Drug Development and Toxicity Testing
PCTS can help researchers evaluate how human tissue responds to potential drugs, including drug metabolism, efficacy, and toxicity. This can provide valuable human-specific information before a treatment reaches clinical testing.

Disease Research
Researchers can use tissue slices to investigate how diseases affect human organs and to better understand the biological processes involved. This can help identify potential therapeutic targets and evaluate possible treatments.

Cancer Research
Slices made from tumor tissue can allow researchers to study the tumor in a setting that retains many of its original cellular components and structure. Researchers can examine how cancer cells interact with surrounding tissue and how they respond to potential therapies, including immunotherapies.

Personalized Medicine
As technologies such as genetic sequencing and gene editing continue to advance, viable human tissue may provide new opportunities to study how an individual’s tissue responds to specific treatments. In the future, this could help researchers move closer to selecting therapies based on the characteristics of an individual patient.

Much of the current PCTS research has focused on organs such as the liver and lung, where researchers have demonstrated valuable applications. However, the field is expanding. Researchers are also investigating the use of precision-cut slices from organs including the heart and brain, as well as other tissues.

As the technology develops, the potential applications—and the types of human tissue that can be studied—are likely to continue growing.

Perhaps one of the most compelling benefits of PCTS is the potential to extend the research value of a single donated organ. Instead of one organ supporting a single research project, precision-cutting technology can potentially produce numerous standardized tissue slices that can be distributed among researchers and used for multiple experiments. This creates an opportunity to multiply the scientific impact of each donation.

This represents an important evolution in the way donated human organs can contribute to medicine. The goal is not simply to provide researchers with tissue. It is to help ensure that every appropriate donation can generate as much knowledge and scientific value as possible.

Precision-cut tissue slices represent an important step toward a more human-relevant approach to biomedical research. They do not replace every existing research model, nor are they appropriate for every scientific question. Instead, they provide researchers with another powerful tool—one that allows them to study viable human tissue while maintaining much of the complexity that makes human organs unique.

As PCTS technology continues to improve, its potential could extend well beyond today’s applications. More organs, more disease models, more therapeutic approaches, and more researchers may benefit from access to viable human tissue.

Most importantly, PCTS offers a way to do more with every donated organ. For the donor and their family, that means a single gift has the potential to reach farther—supporting multiple research efforts, accelerating scientific discovery, and contributing to the development of future treatments.

The promise of precision-cut tissue slices is therefore bigger than the technology itself. It is an opportunity to maximize the scientific legacy of every donor and help transform donated human organs into more discoveries, more knowledge, and ultimately, more hope for patients.