[Editors] MIT method allows 3-D study of cells

[Elizabeth Thomson]

MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
Phone: 617-253-2700
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www

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MIT method allows 3-D study of cells

--Work could impact tissue engineering

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For Immediate Release
MONDAY, APR. 24, 2006
Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-258-5402
Email: thomson at mit.edu

--IMAGE AVAILABLE--

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--MIT bioengineers have devised a new technique that 
makes it possible to learn more about how cells are organized in 
tissues and potentially even to regrow cells for repairing areas of 
the body damaged by disease, accidents or aging.

The method gives them unprecedented control over organizing cells 
outside the body in three dimensions, which is how they exist inside 
the body. It uses electricity to move cells into a desired position, 
followed by light to lock them into place within a gel that resembles 
living tissue.

Cells traditionally have been studied in two dimensions in a Petri 
dish, but certain cells behave differently in two dimensions than in 
three.

"We have shown that the behavior of cartilage cells is affected 
significantly when they are organized in 3-D," as is the behavior of 
other types of cells like stem cells, said MIT Associate Professor 
Sangeeta Bhatia of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and 
Technology (HST), one author of a paper on the technique due to 
appear in the May issue of Nature Methods.

"This raises questions about how cells might sense their organization 
in 3-D and how important this might be in other tissues," said Dirk 
Albrecht, a postdoctoral associate in Bhatia's lab and lead author of 
the paper. "We now have a method to answer some of these questions in 
the lab."

Scientists have until now studied cells in 3-D by placing them 
randomly into a gel. The cells clump together into "cell spheroids," 
but that is a slow process, and the size and shape of the cell clumps 
vary significantly. In addition, cells that communicate by direct 
contact can end up too far apart.

The new technique allows for precise control of cell organization, 
and takes minutes to perform compared to hours or days for the other 
method.

Albrecht and his colleagues have been using a micropatterning 
technique to carefully position the cells within about 10 microns of 
each other. That's nearly the diameter of a cell and about one-fifth 
the diameter of a human hair. The technique uses a device made with 
photolithography, the same process used to create circuit patterns on 
electronic microchips.

In the paper, the MIT researchers said they have formed more than 
20,000 cell clusters with precise sizes and shapes within a single 
gel. They have since scaled that up several-fold. They also have 
created layers of different cells, attempting to mimic the structure 
of tissue inside the body.

While the technique may one day be applied to engineer tissues for 
medical applications, its first use will be for basic research on how 
cells are organized, how they function and communicate in tissues, 
and how they develop into organs or tumors. The 3-D organization of 
cells also may help researchers understand how cells respond to drugs 
when they are in a normal state compared to a diseased state like 
cancer.

"We also think this technique will be useful for building engineered 
tissues in specific ways," Bhatia said. "It wasn't possible until now 
to get this degree of control over cells in 3-D."

Other authors on the paper are MIT HST postdoctoral fellow Greg 
Underhill, University of California at San Diego Professor of 
Bioengineering Robert Sah and UCSD alumnus Travis Wassermann.

The authors have applied for a patent on their work.

The research was funded by The Whitaker Foundation, the National 
Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the David and 
Lucille Packard Foundation and NASA.

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Elizabeth A. Thomson
Assistant Director, Science & Engineering News
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
News Office, Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
617-258-5402 (ph); 617-258-8762 (fax)
<thomson at mit.edu>

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www>
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