Organoids in action – ORGANACT

Organoids are three-dimensional tissue structures that resemble organs (brain, liver, etc.) and that self-organize in vitro. They have undergone a spectacular development in the last ten years, with the development of techniques facilitating their fabrication from human and animal stem cells. The Organact project uses an interdisciplinary approach combining sociology, anthropology and law to study human organoids and the issues they raise in their use. A first objective is to explore biomedical practices (care and research) that rely on organoids. Our second objective is to understand the impact of organoids on these practices, and how they make them evolve. Our hypothesis is that the specificities and uncertainties related to organoids challenge existing frameworks in biomedical research and the health system. A second hypothesis is that organoids give rise to distributed regulatory activities, which our project aims to account for. Given the specificities and uncertainties of organoids, including their legal framework, our project responds to a need by proposing an analysis of the regulatory activities applicable to human organoids, based on sociological, anthropological and legal studies in an interdisciplinary approach that will allow us to address these new objects. The ethnographic fieldwork consists of studying four complementary cases in France covering a continuum of practices from fundamental research to clinical application. The legal analysis will integrate these cases and will be completed by an approach based on an exegesis of the European and French texts. Our interdisciplinary research will thus be able to understand the transformations and dynamics brought about by the use of organoids.