Benchmarking porcine pancreatic ductal organoids for drug screening applications

Abstract

Primary human pancreatic ductal organoids (HPDO) have emerged as a model to study pancreas biology and disease. Yet, donor material availability, and a lack of extensive benchmarking limits the range of applications. To address this gap, we established porcine pancreatic ductal organoids (PPDO) as a system from an easily obtainable source to model pancreatic ductal/progenitor biology. We benchmarked PPDO to HPDO and primary porcine pancreas using single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-Seq). We observed no overt phenotypic differences in PPDO derived from distinct developmental stages, with a WNT signaling enriched population characterizing PPDO. PPDO exhibited differentiation potential towards mature ductal cells and limited potential towards endocrine lineages. We used PPDO as a platform to assess the safety of FDA-approved drugs and showed conserved toxicity of statins and -adrenergic receptor inhibitors between PPDO and HPDO cultures. Overall, our results highlight the PPDO as a model for mammalian duct/progenitor applications.