Current and future applications of three-dimensional brain and cardiac organoids in translational medicine: from disease modeling to drug discovery

Over the past decade, organoid research has made transformative advances, emerging as a powerful platform to address key limitations of traditional biomedical models. Although animal systems remain indispensable for studying disease mechanisms, their limited ability to accurately recapitulate human-specific physiology and pathophysiology has contributed to the high failure rate of drug candidates during clinical translation. The emergence of three-dimensional (3D) organoid systems, such as brain and cardiac organoids derived from stem cells, represents a major technological breakthrough. These self-organizing multicellular constructs closely mimic key architectural, cellular, and functional features of native human tissues, enabling more physiologically relevant modeling of complex neurological and cardiovascular disorders. Beyond fundamental biological investigations, brain and cardiac organoids have demonstrated substantial utility in drug screening, toxicity assessment, and precision medicine approaches, including patient-specific disease modeling and therapeutic response prediction. This review highlights recent progress in brain and cardiac organoid technologies, discusses their applications in translational and regenerative medicine, and evaluates their current limitations and future directions in disease modeling and drug discovery.