PBS Biotech
Cell Therapy · Organoids & Islets

Organoids, Embryoids & SC-Islets

Generate uniform aggregates, embryoids and organoids at scale, from pancreatic islets to brain, liver and blood-vessel models, with the size control that drives consistent differentiation.

12×
more islets at 5× scale
183k IEQ
from one 0.5 L batch
15 / 15
mice reversed diabetes
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Why Vertical-Wheel® for Organoids

Organoids and stem-cell islets demand two things at once: gentle handling and homogeneous mixing. Vertical-Wheel® delivers low-shear, well-mixed suspension that keeps aggregate size tight and lets morphogen gradients guide cell fate, the conditions that make scalable, reproducible 3D differentiation possible.

Size uniformity

Homogeneous mixing yields narrow aggregate and organoid size distributions, the critical quality attribute for reproducible, efficient differentiation.

Gentle yet well-mixed

A rare combination of low shear for high viability with effective dispersion, so growth factors and cytokines diffuse uniformly through every organoid.

Scalable differentiation

Multi-week protocols run start-to-finish in suspension and scale linearly: a 5× volume increase delivered 12× more islets with no quality compromise.

Know What You're Growing

Aggregate, Embryoid or Organoid?

The terms get used loosely, but each is a distinct 3D structure with its own quality attributes. An aggregate is uniform and undifferentiated; an organoid is structured and differentiated. The same gentle, homogeneous Vertical-Wheel® mixing serves them all.

UNIFORM · UNDIFFERENTIATED
PSC Aggregate

A spherical cluster of uniform, undifferentiated pluripotent stem cells, the starting material you expand before differentiation begins.

GASTRULATING
Embryoid Body

A cluster differentiating into all three germ layers at once, the earliest branch point toward many downstream lineages.

STRUCTURED · DIFFERENTIATED
PSC-Derived Organoid

A non-uniform cluster differentiated into target cell types that mimics the structure or function of an organ in vivo: brain, retina, blood vessel and more.

FROM ADULT TISSUE
Primary-Derived Organoid

Cells isolated from adult tissue and re-aggregated into functional constructs, such as hepatic seed constructs for liver therapeutics.

Applications

What You Can Build.

Workflows our customers and collaborators run on the Vertical-Wheel® platform, every one backed by published data or a protocol below.

  • SC-islets (diabetes)
  • Liver organoids
  • Brain & cerebellar organoids
  • Retinal organoids
  • Blood-vessel organoids
  • Embryoids / EBs
  • Disease modeling
  • Drug & tox screening
183,000

A single 0.5 L Vertical-Wheel® batch produced roughly 183,000 islet-equivalents (IEQ) of glucose-responsive SC-islets, enough by published dosing to treat a ~34 lb patient, and the SC-islets reversed diabetes in all fifteen transplanted mice.

Source · npj Regenerative Medicine, 2025
Two Ways Customers Use Them

The Therapy, or the Model.

An organoid can be the product itself, a cell therapy, or a physiologically relevant model for drug and disease research. Vertical-Wheel® has published proof in both.

As the Therapy

Regenerative Medicine

183k IEQ / 0.5 L batch

Stem-cell-derived islets are a leading cell therapy for type 1 diabetes, and the full multi-week differentiation runs in Vertical-Wheel® suspension.

3D islet differentiation direct from pluripotent stem cellsEnriched for β-cells (~63%) with glucose-responsive insulin releaseReversed diabetes in every transplanted diabetic mouse5× volume scale-up delivered 12× more islets with no quality compromise
As the Model

Disease Modeling & Drug Testing

Tunable maturity

Liver and other organoids serve as physiologically relevant models for disease research, toxicology and personalized medicine.

Activin A gradients tune organoid maturity, from immature and cystic to dense and matureLow shear with controlled mass transport enables precise morphogen-gradient controlHomogeneous sizing drives the simultaneous differentiation and spatial arrangement organoids require
Member · Organoid COMMONS

Setting the Standard, Together.

PBS Biotech is part of the Organoid COMMONS, the Consortium for Organoid Manufacturing, Measurement, Optimization, and Network for Standards. It is a pre-competitive, public-private alliance that brings tools providers together to define how iPSC-derived organoids are made, measured and qualified.

Organoids only replace animal models if two labs running the same protocol get the same construct. That is a standards problem before it is a science problem, so we work on it in the open with the rest of the ecosystem.

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Pre-competitive

What It Is

A collaborative hub of technology leaders building shared standards and workflows for organoid development, manufacturing and characterization. Members contribute cell sourcing, defined microenvironments, scalable manufacturing and analytics, then agree on how the pieces fit together.

90%+ clinical attrition

Why It Matters

More than 90% of drug candidates that clear animal testing still fail in human trials. The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 opened the door to human-relevant New Approach Methodologies, but regulators need models that are reproducible and qualified. COMMONS exists to produce the standardized workflows, iPSC banks and organoid libraries that make that acceptance possible.

0.1 → 80 L

What It Means for You

Scale is where organoid standards get stress-tested, and that is what we bring to the table. Vertical-Wheel® suspension gives the consortium one reproducible, GMP-ready route from a 0.1 L screen to an 80 L batch, and gives you protocols developed against emerging COMMONS standards rather than a single lab's recipe.

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The Organoid COMMONS is a public-private consortium organized by Pluristyx, working across founding members in iPSC sourcing, defined microenvironments, and scalable manufacturing and analytics.

Talk to us about organoid standards
Resources & Data

The Evidence for Organoids.

Application notes, protocols and peer-reviewed data with tangible results in Vertical-Wheel® bioreactors, leading with the studies that show real numbers.

No documents are tagged for this cell type yet.

The Technology

One Wheel. Gentle, Homogeneous Mixing.

Every result on this page comes back to the same mechanism: a single vertically-oriented wheel that suspends cells uniformly at low shear, from 0.1 L to 80 L.

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Ready to Scale Your Organoids Process?

Talk to an application scientist about a Vertical-Wheel® path tuned to your cell type and timeline.