Inside NIH's Strategy For Standardizing Organoid Models

Srivatsan Kidambi explains why NIH's SOM Center began with four distinct organ systems. Rather than creating one universal standard, the goal was to stress-test standardization frameworks across diverse biological challenges. The discussion introduces one of the dominant themes of the webinar: context of use.

Kidambi stressed that “standardization does not mean making every organoid identical,” but rather requires distinguishing “technical variability from biological variability.” In that framework, “the model itself is only part of the infrastructure,” because how researchers measure an organoid can matter just as much as how they build it.