Abs Khan
abattacks.bsky.social
Abs Khan
@abattacks.bsky.social
Research Fellow @ MRC WIMM. Permanent resident of tissue culture hood 82. Organoids, bone marrow and haematopoeisis by day. Heavy metal, climbing, bookworm also by day let’s be honest I’m too old to do anything in the evenings any more.
8 years of funding is an incredible opportunity to get stuck in so very excited to get cracking with some research!
November 4, 2025 at 2:46 PM
A huge and heartfelt thank you to all the wonderful colleagues and friends who have supported me through the highs and lows to get here. There are too many to name (and I'd be afraid to miss someone)... but none of this is possible without people fighting your corner.
November 4, 2025 at 2:46 PM
As a side note - I didn't think much of a 100km row over the whole month, but 10km in and I must say I am questioning my judgement/fitness/ability...
June 3, 2025 at 7:47 AM
Looking forward to it Zoltan - bring me some home cooking !
April 16, 2025 at 5:58 PM
I loved this course! If Aiden or Natalie are instructing say hi from me!
April 2, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Thank you 😀
March 12, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Very kind of you Dianne, appreciated!
February 19, 2025 at 7:38 AM
Finally finally a big thank you to everyone who has engaged with and showed an interest in implementing the system. I am hopeful that we can make big strides forward as a community as these types of systems advance. Thank you to patients + funders!
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
. If you're interested in implementing please join: groups.google.com/g/morerganoids
Where we help troubleshoot + share protocols etc.

And this is the playlist:
open.spotify.com/playlist/380...
To which the paper was written for everyone out there who writes/works to very specific music.
Bone Marrow Organoids - Google Groups
groups.google.com
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
A lot of the major therapeutic challenges and many interesting questions are around clonal evolution, chemoresistance etc. To address those well we need longer lived, 'stable' cultures - we see a decline in complexity over time in our static cultures. Watch this space!
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
I'll end on quoting @kellystevens.bsky.social 'It's not about how far we've come, but about how far we have left to go.' I hope you will agree this is a big step forward, but there are still challenges that I am excited to tackle (funding pending of course).
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
... you can build in a lot of complexity and work out strategies to retain throughput and scalability.
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
We present what we believe is a highly complex in vitro model that showcases the potential of human organoid systems. By adapting granular microgels pioneered by colleagues in the bioengineering field (e.g. J Burdick and others), I think we also show that...
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
Finally that helps us identify an inflammatory pathway (MIF) which we think underpins myeloma mediated inflammation. We show that inhibiting this in myeloma-comBO chimeroids ameliorates markers of inflammation.
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
We then apply this system as a pre-clinical model to study multiple myeloma - showing that we support primary myeloma cells (notoriously difficult to culture ex vivo) and capture hallmarks of their extensive interactions with bone marrow niches.
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
In this manuscript we address these to present comBO: a combined bone and lympho-myeloid bone marrow organoid system (I know the acronym is a bit of a reach, but it's stuck now).
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
(1) Capturing simultaneous lympho- and myelopoiesis in a single culture to better model haematopoiesis. (2) Generating the specialist osteoblastic niche and (3) circumventing the limitations imposed by bulk hydrogel embedding (cost, labour, scalability, automation).
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
On to the science! Despite recent advances in developing bone marrow organoid systems (our own work in Cancer Discovery (2023) and Nature Protocols (2024) + Frenz-Weissner paper (Nature Methods, 2024), the major challenges (as we see them) remained:
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
And of course @bethpsaila.bsky.social for all the support (and patience...). A big thank you to the whole HSCB lab for all the support which most often manifests as pranks/coffee/donuts...
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM
... it can still be fun so a huge thank you to everyone who made it so. In particular shout out to @yuqi-shen.bsky.social qi-shen.bsky.social without whose support it would have been impossible to do this. @Sarah Gooding for gentle guidance and excellent collaboration in the myeloma world.
February 18, 2025 at 7:57 AM