A LITTLE MOLD CAN BE A GOOD THING
“[Some] of the problems through the years have been that the formats for 3-D cell culture have been expensive, cumbersome [and] difficult to work with,” says Jeff Morgan, president and chief executive officer of Microtissues in Providence, Rhode Island. However, many scientists have been willing to tolerate these problems in order to use 3-D cultures. Indeed, even Harrison’s original hanging-drop method remains a staple technique in some areas of cell biology, despite its limitations.
Hoping to make 3-D systems more convenient and flexible, Morgan and his colleagues found a surprisingly simple solution: agarose. Cells grown on the ubiquitous gelling reagent can’t stick to its surface. That would be a disaster for conventional 2-D cultures, which depend on surface adhesion to form monolayers, but Microtissues turns nonadhesion into an asset. In the company’s system, cells fall into tiny wells molded into the surface of the agarose, where they form spherical structures.
