Just over a year ago, a group of researchers in Austria announced with much fanfare that they had pulled off a spectacular feat of stem-cell science. They had taken induced pluripotent stem cells (which behave similarly to embryonic stem cells, but are made from skin cells and thus do not require the destruction of human embryos) and coaxed them into differentiating and growing into objects known as organoids. An organoid is not a proper organ, but it resembles one in scientifically useful ways, both in the mixture of cells it contains and in its anatomical features. In choosing which organ to mimic, Madeline Lancaster of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology, in Vienna, who led this research, went for the big one-the brain. Dr Lancaster's organoid was not the first, however. That honour had fallen, a couple of years earlier and largely unnoticed by the world, to a humbler part of the body, the intestine. Intestinoids were created in James Wells's laboratory at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Centre, in Ohio, in 2011. Now, another group of researchers at Dr Wells's lab have produced a third sort. As they report in Nature, Kyle McCraken and his colleagues have grown simulacra of stomachs.
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