Maastricht University, Netherlands
MERLN Institute for Technology-Inspired Regenerative Medicine


Invited Talk

Mini dishes of live – engineered 3D cell environments in film-based microwells

Petri dishes in their various forms are the most successful cell culture ware. Their flat, smooth and also stiff bottom, nowadays from oxidized tissue culture polystyrene, is the reference culture substrate in many assays. However, nature is three-dimensional and highly detailed. Accordingly, our understanding how cellular microenvironments in the year 2023 should look like, and also could look like in terms of bioengineering possibilities, has considerably grown since the microbiologist Julius Petri pioneered the glass version of his dish around 1880. In this talk, we will introduce the concept of miniaturized culture dishes and Boyden chambers/culture inserts in the form of polymer film-based microwells. They serve as engineered 3D cellular microenvironments for spheroids, also in the form of hybrid cell-micromaterial aggregates, embryoid bodies, organoids and (other) epithelial cell layers. The microwells can be enriched by decorating their bottoms and walls with micro- or nanotopographies and with (bio)chemical, cell-adhesive microdomains for the organization and instruction of cells, and provided with microporosity for the perfusion and supply with gas and nutrients, diffusion of cellular signals and migration/invasion of cells. Porous film /membrane microwells can be also given cell-scale curvature for the establishment of bioinspired barrier tissue models. The delivery of engineered microobjects to the microwells makes further cell-instructive interfaces within their volume available. Envisioned applications of the above-introduced culture platforms range from advanced in vitro model systems to bottom-up tissue engineering and beyond.