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.