Watching micro-tissues grow, communicate and die
Today it is possible to test drugs or study complex biological mechanisms on three-dimensional micro-tissues that closely resemble parts of natural organs. In their research, Elise Aeby, Patrick M. Misun and Olivier Frey from the Bio-Engineering Lab of Andreas Hierlemann study micro-tissues of colon cancer in hanging hydrogel drops on a micro-fluidic chip, monitoring tissues’ growth and cell death, and human liver tissues that were exposed to cytochalasin D, a cell-invading toxin.
The developed technique is promising as high-resolution time-lapse imaging provides detailed information on complex processes even down to single-cell level. The study was published on 22 May in Advanced Biosystems.
Aeby, E. et al. (2018) external page Microfluidic Hydrogel Hanging-Drop Network for Long-Term Culturing of 3D Microtissues and Simultaneous High-Resolution Imaging. Advanced Biosystems, 10.1002/adbi.20180005.