Colon carcinoma development in the dish 

With permission from NPG, licence number:  3575540372115

Researchers from Japan were able to model the development of colon cancer in intestinal organoids. CRISPR was used to disrupt APC, SMAD4 and TP53 tumor suppressor genes and to introduce tumor specific mutations into KRAS and PIK3CA in intestinal organoids isolated from human patients. Most interestingly engineered normal tissue was not converted to highly invasive tumor. On the contrary, when the engineering was done in chromosome instabile adenomas, the organoids formed macrometastatic colonies in mice. This study shows the versatility of genome editing to model a highly complex disease process.

Matano M, Date S, Shimokawa M, Takano A, Fujii M, Ohta Y, Watanabe T, Kanai T,
Sato T. Modeling colorectal cancer using CRISPR-Cas9-mediated engineering of
human intestinal organoids. Nat Med. 2015 Feb 23.

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3802.html