Jarno Drost

Jarno Drost has established comprehensive pediatric cancer organoid biobanks and pioneered CRISPR engineering of organoids to model cancer-associated genetic alterations in a stepwise fashion. His laboratory has generated organoid models of Wilms tumor, neuroblastoma, and other pediatric cancers that were previously difficult to culture, providing essential models for drug discovery in childhood malignancies. He has used CRISPR-engineered isogenic organoid pairs to dissect the functional consequences of individual cancer driver mutations. His work on serial passaging and genetic evolution of tumor organoids has validated their long-term genomic stability as renewable research resources.