Comparative study of tumor 3D modelling methods
2017
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, USA
Despite recent advances, better in vitro models are needed to improve our understanding of cancer progression and increase the translationality of new findings. Multicellular tumor spheroids are a popular choice for 3D tumor modelling because they capture many of the features present in vivo. However, there is a lack of reproducibility in the observations obtained through the different techniques used to build these 3D models. Here, human breast, prostate and ovarian cancer cells are used in hydrogel, microwells or suspension culture set-ups to compare their behaviour and characterize the different modelling techniques. The results showed that the different approaches induced different reliance on genes involved in cell-cell or cell-matrix interactions. Moreover, drug sensitivity depended on the type of cell growth induced by the model setup. Finally, a human ovarian cancer cell line culture in the hydrogel setup was found to have the most reproducible drug response when compared to patient cells, despite being the most time and cost-intensive. Overall, the researchers demonstrate that the methods used to build 3D models have an influence on the outcome of the experimental procedures performed and have to be carefully chosen depending on the applications required.
Comparative study of multicellular tumor spheroid formation methods and implications for drug screening
Shelly R Peyton
Added on: 10-04-2021
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.7b00069[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/ffebe454-ed9a-47cf-8a33-8cf70c1b7d38
