Robotic printing and drug testing of 384-well tumor spheroids

A major impediment to anti-cancer drug development is the lack of a reliable and inexpensive tumor model to test the efficacy of candidate compounds. This need has emerged due to the insufficiency of widely-used monolayer cultures to predict drug efficacy in vivo. Spheroids, 3D compact clusters of cancer cells, mimic important characteristics of tumors and provide a tissue analog for drug testing. Here we present a novel spheroid formation microtechnology that is simple to use and allows high throughput drug screening in 384-microwell plates. This approach is based on a polymeric aqueous two-phase system. The denser aqueous phase is mixed with cancer cells at a desired density. Using a robotic liquid handler, a drop of this cell suspension is dispensed into each well of a 384-microwell plate containing the second, immersion aqueous phase. Cancer cells remain contained in the drop, which rests on the well bottom, and form a spheroid during incubation. The use of liquid handling robotics ensures precise dispensing of a single drop, resulting in a single spheroid per well and homogenously sized spheroids within each plate. We confirmed the consistency of production of spheroids and demonstrated their biological relevance to tumors. A proof of concept study with spheroids of triple negative breast cancer cells treated with a standard chemotherapeutic compound, doxorubicin, showed the potential of this method for drug testing. This spheroid culture microtechnology presents key advantages over existing methods such as the ease of drug and viability reagent addition, ability to analyze spheroids without transferring them to a new plate, and the elimination of the need for specialized plates or devices to form spheroids. Incorporating this technology in anti-cancer drug development pipeline will help examine the efficacy of drug candidates more effectively and expedite discovery of novel drugs.