A human-cell–based, macro-scale bone marrow model has been engineered to reproduce a wide range of bone marrow cell types in a scalable construct roughly eight millimeters in diameter and four millimeters thick, sustaining human blood formation in culture for weeks.

Developed by a team from the University of Basel and University Hospital Basel, the model incorporates multiple niches, notably the endosteal niche near the bone surface, and uses hydroxyapatite as a scaffold with hiPSC-derived cells.

This is the first realistic bone marrow model engineered entirely from human cells, published in Cell Stem Cell, with the goal of improving cancer therapies and reducing animal testing.

While promising, the current model size may limit parallel testing of many compounds and doses, highlighting a need to miniaturize for high-throughput screening.

Researchers note the necessity of miniaturization and further development to enable personalized medicine workflows within this platform.

Nonetheless, the platform could be optimized to test multiple compounds and doses and to better study blood diseases and blood cancer mechanisms despite its current scale.

The work, led by Professor Ivan Martin and Dr. Andrés García García, marks a step toward replacing some animal experiments with human-cell–based systems and is reported in Cell Stem Cell.

The Basel-based team, from the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel and University Hospital Basel, published the study under the leadership of Professor Martin and Dr. García García.

In a paper published in Cell Stem Cell, the researchers describe a macro-scale, scaffold-assisted model of the human bone marrow endosteal niche using hiPSC-vascularized osteoblastic organoids, led by Martin and García García.

The study titled Macro-scale, scaffold-assisted model of the human bone marrow endosteal niche using hiPSC-vascularized osteoblastic organoids was published on November 18, 2025.

The human-cell–based model aims to reduce reliance on animal experiments and could complement animal studies by improving understanding of healthy and diseased blood formation, as well as informing drug testing and personalized therapies.

Potential applications include drug testing and, in the long term, patient-specific personalized therapies by testing treatments on bone marrow models to identify the most effective option.

This work addresses a major gap in bone marrow research, moving beyond animal models and traditional cell cultures toward more human-relevant in vitro models.

The model integrates multiple niche components—blood vessels, bone cells, nerves, and immune cells—providing a more complete human cellular ecosystem than prior models.