One-step achievement of tumor spheroid-induced angiogenesis in a high-throughput microfluidic platform: one-step tumor angiogenesis platform

Research on the development of anti-cancer drugs has progressed, but the low reliability of animal experiments due to biological differences between animals and humans causes failures in the clinical process. To overcome this limitation, 3-dimensional (3D) in vitro models have been developed to mimic the human cellular microenvironment using polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). However, due to the characteristics and limitations of PDMS, it has low efficiency and is not suitable to be applied in the preclinical testing of a drug. High-throughput microfluidic platforms fabricated by injection molding have been developed, but these platforms require a laborious process when handling spheroids. We recently developed an injection-molded plastic array 3D culture tissue platform that integrates the process from spheroid formation to reconstruction of an in vitro model with spheroids (All-in-One-IMPACT). In this study, we implemented a 3D tumor spheroid angiogenesis model in the developed platform. We analyzed the tendency for angiogenesis according to gel concentration and confirmed that angiogenesis occurred using cancer cell lines and patient-derived cancer cells (PDCs). We also administered an anti-cancer drug to the PDC tumor spheroid angiogenesis model to observe the drug’s effect on angiogenesis according to its concentration. We demonstrated that our platform can be used to study the tumor microenvironment (TME) and drug screening. We expect that this platform will contribute to further research on the complex mechanisms of the TME and predictive preclinical models.