Why You Should Consider Culturing Your Cells in 3-D

2-D versus 3-D and meaningful outcomes

We have seen recent growth in our customers' demand for 3-D cell based assay solutions. This could be due to more the fact that these assays our proving to generate more in vivo like data.

Breast cancer cells, for example, grown in 2-D can easily be killed by low doses of chemotherapeutic drugs or low doses of radiation. If those same cells are grown in 3-D, they are resistant to the same doses of chemotherapeutic drugs or radiation, just like cancer as its found in the body. In this way, cells grown in 3D are more valid targets for testing and discovering new drugs to treat cancer. Another benefit of testing drugs in three dimensional cell culture versus two dimensional cell culture is that cells in 3D form multi-layers of cells whereas cells grown in 2-D form a monolayer of cells that is spread very thin on a plastic surface. When testing a drug in 2-D, it needs only to diffuse a short distance across the cell membrane to reach its intended target. In 3-D, the situation is more realistic and a drug needs to diffuse across multi-layers of cells to reach the cells on the inside of a microtissue.

Neuromics has a variety of options that will enable you to choose the best option(s) for your 3-D assays. These include:

• Collagel Hydrogels-New-Formulated using Type 1 Bovine, Human or Rat Collagen
• 3-D Nanofiber Solutions-Aligned Scaffolds, Randomly Oriented Scaffolds and Interactive Microenvironment System (IMEMS). 
• AlphaMAX3D-Potent three dimensional environment for cell culturing 
• AlphaGEL3D-Novel synthetic peptide hydrogel 
• Extracellular Matrix (ECM) Proteins-ECM proteins for cell culturing

Look for more posting on these important solutions.