NORTH scientists have developed simple technology to grow stem cells in the lab in conditions similar to the human body, it has been announced. The development at Durham University allows the cells to grow in three dimensions, rather than just two on the flat surface of a petri dish. It means drugs can be more successfully tested in the lab, and could reduce unnecessary testing on animals. Cells are grown on a scaffold the size of a 10p piece made out of highly-porous polystyrene, and which looks like a thin white disc.
The design, which has been developed and patented by the university and its company ReInnervate, has the structure of a sponge and allows cells to develop in the holes inside. The developers said growing cells in 3D allows them to behave more similarly to how they function in the body. Many drugs fail at the testing stage, costing the pharmaceutical industry millions of pounds, and many of the failed products are trialled on cells in a petri dish. A study of the effectiveness of the technology appears in today’s Journal of Anatomy, and it found that cells grown on the plastic scaffold stood up more robustly to the toxic effect of a liver cancer drug called MTX when compared to the cells grown on the flat. Dr Stefan Przyborski, a senior researcher at Durham University and chief scientific officer at ReInnervate, said: “Our results suggest that testing drugs on liver cells using our 3D culture system may be more likely to reflect true physiological responses to toxic substances. “Because the 3D cells are cultivated under more realistic conditions, it means that they function more like real tissues. “Scientists are therefore able to gain a more accurate idea of how a drug will behave in the human body – knowledge which can contribute to improving the efficiency of drug discovery, reducing drug development costs, and may help reduce the number of animals in research. There are other ways to grow cells in 3D in the laboratory. However, these approaches are restricted by their variability, complexity, expense, and they are not easily adapted to routine use in high throughput screening studies. “Our technology is essentially a well engineered piece of plastic that provides a suitable environment for cells to grow more naturally in a 3D configuration. Our product is available off-the-shelf, it is easy to use in routine applications, it is highly adaptable to different tests, it is inert and it is cheap and easy to produce and manufacture.” | 
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