5. Conclusions and Outlook
Significant progress in the preparation and application of taste bud
organoids has been achieved, which has promoted the research in the
field of taste sensation. Specifically, various kinds of organoids have
shown promising prospects and potential applications in many fields such
as drug screening, toxicity testing, disease modeling, and regenerative
medicine. The establishment of organoids is able to achieve more
effective and true detection of drug efficacy and toxicity, precisely
because organoids could be directly cultured and generated from human
iPSCs, which largely avoids inconsistent test results caused by
differences between animals and human cells. Therefore, this review
systematically summarizes the existing research on taste bud organoids,
laying a theoretical foundation for more in-depth research in this area
in the future.
However, there are still many challenges for further development and
application of taste bud organoids due to their own inherent
shortcomings. For example, the construction of tissues and organsin vitro is still a big challenge. Therefore, it is hoped that
the establishment and research of organoids are capable of furthering
this challenge. Meanwhile, there are few applications for taste bud
organoids. The current research using taste bud organoids reveals its
proliferation ability, growth and development characteristics, oral
mucositis treatment and a few functional genes researches, but the
specific mechanism is still unclear. It is very likely that the research
on organoids will mainly focus on disease models, such as
development-related problems, genetic diseases, tumors, and cancers. By
using the patient’s iPSCs, valuable disease models have been
established, which have been simulated and reproduced in vitro .
However, in terms of taste bud organoids, there is few disease modeling,
drug screening, or research combined with sensors. In spite of the first
big step has been successfully taken, there are still many imperfections
that need to be solved urgently, and the road to organoid research is
continuing.