This week at the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening conference in San Diego Dr. Thomas Villani from Visikol and Dr. Ann Rossi from Corning teamed up to give a presentation on how to easily culture 3D cell culture models as well as how to characterize them in their entirety.
For the full tutorial: Rock the Science of 3D! Corning Life Sciences Exhibitor Tutorial
It has recently been shown that 3D in vitro cell culture models have improved in vivo relevancy compared to traditional monolayer models and thus researchers with a wide-range of backgrounds are rapidly beginning to adopt these models into their work. Two major adoption hurdles for incorporating these models into a research workflow are generating reproducible 3D cell culture models as well as characterizing these models in their entirety. Corning has focused on reducing the barrier to adoption for these 3D models by developing their Ultra-low attachment (ULA) well plates which allow for easy and uniform 3D cell culture formation.
Additionally, their ULA plates ensure that 3D cell cultures rest at the center of the well which dramatically reduces the time required to find the cell cultures for image-based assays. However, one of the major problems with working with 3D cell cultures is how to extract meaningful data from them as homogenization assays remove valuable spatial information, histological sectioning is tedious and confocal or wide-field imaging bias results towards only characterizing the periphery of these models because of light attenuation.
To address this problem, Visikol has developed their Visikol® HISTO-M™ tissue clearing reagent which allows for complete 3D cell culture characterization using confocal imaging or a 3-fold increase in cells detected using wide-field microscopy. This tissue clearing approach has been developed to be rapid and compatible with well plates so that it can be conducted using automated pipetting robots and high content confocal imagers. The ability to characterize 3D cell cultures in their entirety allows for complex phenomenon to be investigated such as antibody penetration kinetics or dose-response as a function of depth and for the full potential of these models to be realized.
To learn more about Visikol’s 3Screen In Vitro Services click here.
