A novel 3D hanging drop suspension platform has been used to successfully grow ovarian cancer stem cell (OvCSC) spheroids by a team of researchers from the University of Michigan.
This new platform can be used to study cancer stem cell biology and model tumor reemergence to enable delivery of precision therapy, according to the paper published last month in Clinical Cancer Research.
"Today we're limited to two-dimensional cells grown in bovine serum that's derived from cows. Cells grown this way often don't respond to medication the same way as ovarian cancer cells inside the body," said Geeta Mehta, the Dow Corning Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at U-M and leader of the research team that developed the technique. "Three-dimensional cultured spheroids provide a much more predictive way to test many different medications, and a way to grow many cultured cells from just a few of the patient-derived cells."
The researchers administered cancer drugs to the cultured cancer spheroids and compared their response to that of ovarian cancer cells that had been removed from the same patient and implanted into mice. They found that the response of the cultured spheroids accurately mirrored that of the natural cells implanted in the mice.
Mehta explains that even among cancers, ovarian cancer is particularly menacing. Its free-floating spheroids shuttle cancer through the abdomen with the ability to form new tumors wherever they go--the liver, the intestines, the abdominal wall. And the cells within those spheroids mutate often and unpredictably, quickly developing new strains that resist chemotherapy drugs.
The hanging drop array's hundreds of individual compartments make it possible to grow many spheroids at once and quickly gather data about multiple drugs. This is key, as chemotherapy treatment often requires complex cocktails of multiple drugs administered together. The cells could provide a way to test many such cocktails simultaneously.
While widespread clinical use is likely years off, Mehta says the team now plans to do more extensive testing, culturing cells from patients who are undergoing chemotherapy, then administering the same chemotherapy drugs to the cultured cells and measuring their response.