Cancer Research-Why 3-D Cultures Work

The concept of bringing your cancer cell assay to life with 3-D nanofibers is new. New approaches beg the question, "why change?". Traditional 2-D cultures are the standard and work well enough for many assays.

Change is driven by proof that the new solutions yield better results. I would like to share data showing the potential capabilities and benefits of switching to random and aligned nanofibers.

Increased drug sensitivity

Increased drug sensitivity of human A549 lung cancer cells when grown on random nanofibers or aligned nanofibers when compared to flat tissue culture plastic (TCP). This shows the significant problem of developing drugs using 2-D surfaces and explains why such a large amount of animal testing is required for pre-clinical drug development. Proliferation on 2-D TCPS is artificially high when compared to 3-D culture on nanofibers. Using a high-throughput 3-D nanofiber-based scaffold for in vitro drug screening can more accurately predict the in vivo response of drugs.

The ability to do high-resolution imaging through the nanofiber scaffold (through the bottom of the culture plate) is critical to validate cell/phenotype markers especially in high throughput screening and high content analysis.  Standard microscopes and automated plate readers using light, fluorescence, absorbance, or luminescence are compatible with the nanofiber plates.  Comparison of A549 cells on flat tissue culture polystyrene (A), randomly oriented nanofibers (B), and aligned nanofibers (C).

Cancer Cell Migration-More Like in vivo

Scanning electron microscope images of an ex-vivo human glioblastoma tumor sample cultured on aligned nanofibers showing the tumor dispersion along the nanofibers exactly how they would migrate in vivo along the white matter within the brain and central nervous system.

I will continue to post new developments with our 3-D culturing products. It is our goal to bring your cell based assays to life!