Growing primary cells in 2D on plastic surfaces is not a good representation of the 3D environment of the body, regardless of your purpose. Cells grown in a dish eventually run out of room. They need to be disrupted and seeded onto new plates at a lower density. Then they run out of time. They just get tired and stop dividing. TBH, some days, I feel the same way.
If these challenges can be overcome, we can, in addition to growing larger quantities of cells for investigation or production, learn a lot more biology. I talked to A.J. Mellott, CEO and co-founder of Ronawk, about the technology they have developed that uses hydrogels to allow cells to grow in 3D microenvironments and interact with each other more like they would in the body. The hydrogel blocks - they call them bioblocks - contain microchannels that provide a large surface area, but they also fit together like LEGOs allowing the expansion of a culture by simply adding 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, uh, what's going on.
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.
As much as I enjoyed hearing about the scaling up of cell populations (and scaling down the labor involved), for me the chance to study some biology was equally exciting. One can embed the material with growing cells in paraffin and section it with a microtome to investigate what’s going as cells are migrating and laying down extracellular matrix. What will we learn about cell communication and extracellular matrix production? What are cells putting into exosomes and why? Can we engineer useful therapies from those processes?
Now add a level of complexity. Imagine the possibilities for studying the interactions between different cell types such as joining two blocks, one with tumor cells and another with immune cells to see what happens. For some reason, I can’t get the image of gladiators doing battle in a massive arena out of my head. That’s a ticket I’ll get in line for.
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Stem Cell Expansion Technologies