Cultivating primary cells in 2D on plastic surfaces is not an accurate representation of the human body’s 3D environment. Cells that are grown in a dish eventually find that there is no room to expand further. Consequently, cultivation must be disrupted so the cells can be seeded onto new plates at a lower density. However, time becomes the next challenge as the cells start to exhaust themselves and stop dividing.
If it is somehow possible to circumvent these challenges, it could lead to not only the potential to grow larger quantities of cells for investigation or production but also other breakthroughs in the field of biology.
Image credit: pinkeyes/Shutterstock.com
In this episode, A.J. Mellott, CEO and co-founder of Ronawk, talks about the innovative hydrogel technology they have developed. Hydrogels enable the cultivation of cells in 3D microenvironments, allowing them to interact with each other similarly to what they would in the body.
Ronawk produces hydrogel blocks – bioblocks – which contain microchannels with a larger surface area than 2D plastic substrates. Moreover, they can be stacked like children’s building blocks, facilitating the expansion of a culture by simply introducing more blocks to the matrix.
“It’s really fascinating because now we’re starting to see things that happen inside our hydrogels that we can point to the body and look and say, ‘Oh, this is similar. I see this happening in the body, and we can get more information out of what’s going on,” explains Mellott.
“And we can even start looking at the signaling between the cells and how they talk to each other. So from a scientific perspective, it’s really fun. But then also from a business perspective, we now have this really easy-to-use technology that can help others scale, help others try new experiments and test new medicines that weren’t easy to test before this,” he added.
The scaling-up of cell populations and subsequent scaling-down of the labor involved also offers the chance to learn more about the advances in the biological sciences.
Now, it is possible to embed the material with growing cells in paraffin and section it with a microtome to carefully study what happens as cells migrate through the extracellular matrix. This opens up the potential to learn even more about cell communication and extracellular matrix production as well as determine what cells are putting into exosomes and for what reason. All of this is done with the aim of engineering useful therapies from those very same processes.
Now, adding in an extra layer of complexity. Hydrogels could open up new doors that allow researchers to investigate the interactions between different cell types by simply joining two of these bioblocks: one with tumor cells and another with immune cells. Perhaps, down the line, this could lead to improvements in stem cell growth.
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