A Cancer Cell Spheroid Assay to Assess Invasion in a 3D Setting
Open accessAbstract
The invasive nature of cancer cell lines is thought to correlate with their metastatic potential. Most traditional assays, however, do not examine these invasive features in a three-dimensional environment and the resulting data suffer from reduced biological applicability. Here an approach is presented to visualize the invasive ability of cell lines in a physiologically relevant setting. The cancer cell spheroid invasion assay first utilizes gravity to generate spheroids within drops of media that hang from the lid of a cell culture dish. Next, these spheroids are embedded in a 3D matrix consisting of a mixture of basement membrane materials and type I collagen. Cancer cell egression from the spheroids into the surrounding matrix is then monitored over time. The method described here can be modified to examine invasion after coculture of different cell types, inclusion of drugs/inhibitors, or alterations in extracellular matrix (ECM) constituents.
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Spheroid cell culture has been developed for research on cancer, stem cells, and many organs, including liver, kidney, and heart.
“This approach has been developed in the research of cancer (7, 76, 102), stem cells (17, 120), and many organs (such as liver, kidney, heart, etc.) (3,16,64,75).”
From Modeling physiological events in 2D vs. 3D cell culture (2017) · cites this paper as [7]
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- Authors
- Berens, E. B., Holy, J. M., Riegel, A. T., & Wellstein, A.
- Affiliations
- Georgetown University (US)
- University of Minnesota (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Visualized Experiments
- Publisher
- MyJove Corporation
- Published
- 2015-11-20
- Issue
- 105
- ISSN
- 1940-087X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4692745
- OpenAlex
- W2179971431
- Cited by
- 112
- References
- 20
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 18 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 12 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 4
- FWCI
- 2.77
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Journal of Visualized Experiments (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health
- National Cancer Institute (P30CA051008, T32CA009686)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Oncology › Cancer Cells and Metastasis
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Cell Biology › Cellular Mechanics and Interactions
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › 3D Printing in Biomedical Research
- Keywords
- tumor invasion, 3D cell culture, Matrigel, type I collagen, extracellular matrix, metastasis
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