摘要
Multicellular spheroids have served as a promising preclinical model for drug efficacy testing and disease modeling.Many microfluidic tech no logies,in eluding those based on water-oil-water double emulsions,have been introduced for the production of spheroids.However,sustained culture and the in situ characterization of the gen erated spheroids are currently unavailable for the double emulsion-based spheroid model.This study presents a streamlined workflow,termed the double emulsion-pretreated microwell culture(DEPMiC),incorporating the features of(1)effective initiation of uniform-sized multicellular spheroids by the pretreatment of double emulsions produced by microfluidics without the requirement of biomaterial scaffolds;(2)sustained maintenance and culture of the produced spheroids with facile removal of the oil confinement;and(3)in situ characterization of individual spheroids localized in microwells by a built-in analytical station.Characterized by microscopic observations and Raman spectroscopy,the DEPMiC cultivated spheroids accumulated elevated lipid ordering on the apical membran巳similar to that observed in their Matrigel counterparts.Made possible by the proposed tech no logical advancement,this study subsequently examined the drug responses of these in vitro-generated multicellular spheroids.The developed DEPMiC platform is expected to gen erate health benefits in personalized cancer treatment by offering a pre-animal tool to dissect heterogeneity from individual tumor spheroids.
基金
This work was supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region,China(Project number:CUHK 14201317 and C5011-19GF)
the VC Discretionary Fund
the Chinese University of Hong Kong(Project number:8601014).
作者简介
Correspondence:Yi-Ping Ho,ypho@cuhk.edu.hk。
