How Magnetic 3D Cell Culture Will Change the Future of Drug Discovery
Last edited: - Back to overview
For decades, those in the scientific research field of cell and tissue culture were limited when growing cells in plates, dishes and flasks that they could only grow cells in two dimensions. This meant that the cells being grown weren’t true representations of the real cell environment and behavior. When it comes to growing cells for drug discovery, the unpredictability and the fact that these weren’t representative of the real cell environment meant that there was room for a better methodology.
Growing cells in 3D has become increasingly popular in the last 2 decades with specific innovations in Magnetic 3D Cell Culturing which opens the door for breakthroughs that the scientific and medical communities haven’t seen before. So, what are the most significant breakthroughs that will be coming in the near future thanks to innovations like Magnetic 3D Cell Culture.
A Faster Path to the Cure for Cancer
With 3D models being more predictive of the actual cell behavior, the future could hold the cure for effective cancer treatment faster than we thought. Around 90% of promising pre-clinical trials fail to reproduce their results in human treatments which wastes time but with 3D cells recreating the in-vivo environment, the risk of having the same issues is minimized from the beginning. Currently, patient tumor-derived organoid models have been successfully created from pancreatic cancer cells through magnetic 3D cell culture methods which allow for the testing of various drug treatments on organoids that truly represented cancer in the body.
A Shift Away from Animal Testing Models
With the ability to grow spheroids in the lab on a scalable level it reduces the need to test treatments and drugs on animal subjects. There are also several forms of cancer cells, for example, that do not have a suitable animal model including brain, kidney and skin cancers (Steele and Lubet, 2010) but with 3D Cell Culture it will be possible to grow these cells and put them through the high throughput process.
Cost Savings
Drug development is a long and costly process that has many steps even before reaching clinical trials with one of the most crucial steps being the high-throughput screening process. With 2D models, there is an extremely high failure rate in clinical trials because the reactions of the cells grown in 2D does not mimic the reactions in 3D cells wasting time and money. With the extremely high failure rate in clinical trials being attributed to the 2D model, it would be much less costly when considering product and time to use a 3D model which more closely represents the cells reaction in the body and it more likely to produce positive results.
There are several options for growing cells in 3D including non-scaffold, anchorage-independent, scaffold-based and hybrid 3D models. However, in order to be the most effective these models would need to include cell-to-cell and cell-to-ECM interactions, tissue-specific stiffness, oxygen, nutrient and metabolic waste gradients, and a combination of tissue-specific scaffolding cells (Griffith and Swartz, 2006). While there are several options for growing cells in 3D, Magnetic levitation, an anchorage-independent model, has shown great success in growing viable spheroids for high-throughput.
