1 research outputs found
Superhydrophobic Chips for Cell Spheroids High-Throughput Generation and Drug Screening
We
suggest the use of biomimetic superhydrophobic patterned chips produced
by a benchtop methodology as low-cost and waste-free platforms for
the production of arrays of cell spheroids/microtissues by the hanging
drop methodology. Cell spheroids have a wide range of applications
in biotechnology fields. For drug screening, they allow studying 3D
models in structures resembling real living tissues/tumors. In tissue
engineering, they are suggested as building blocks of bottom-up fabricated
tissues. We used the wettability contrast of the chips to fix cell
suspension droplets in the wettable regions and evaluated on-chip
drug screening in 3D environment. Cell suspensions were patterned
in the wettable spots by three distinct methods: (1) by pipetting
the cell suspension directly in each individual spot, (2) by the continuous
dragging of a cell suspension on the chip, and (3) by dipping the
whole chip in a cell suspension. These methods allowed working with
distinct throughputs and degrees of precision. The platforms were
robust, and we were able to have static or dynamic environments in
each droplet. The access to cell culture media for exchange or addition/removal
of components was versatile and opened the possibility of using each
spot of the chip as a mini-bioreactor. The platforms’ design
allowed for samples visualization and high-content image-based analysis
on-chip. The combinatorial analysis capability of this technology
was validated by following the effect of doxorubicin at different
concentrations on spheroids formed using L929 and SaOs-2 cells