The UK's Francis Crick Institute is the biggest biomedical research facility under a single roof in Europe and is dedicated to understanding the fundamental biology underlying health and disease. 

With 1.8 million new cases in 2018, bowel cancer is one of the most commonly occurring in the world. Vivian Li leads the team of researchers who are growing mini organs in the hope of finding new ways of fighting bowel cancer.

Organoids, or mini-organs, are fundamental for the team's research. The first stage of growing an organoid is to source the correct stem cells. Once they have grown to complete mini organs, cancer-causing mutations can be introduced using gene editing. 

These diseased organoids can then be used to model bowel cancer and predict drug responses.