SC7: Setting Up Effective Functional Screens Using 3D Cell Cultures

Monday, September 21, 3:30-6:30 pm

The course will provide an overview of the various 3D cell culture models available, their strengths and weaknesses, and where and how these models are being used, specifically for oncology research. The instructors will share their experiences on how they tested and evaluated various cell culture reagents and growth matrices, what worked and what didn’t and what you need to consider when setting up low and high throughput screening experiments using 3D cell cultures in your lab. The challenges working with 3D cell cultures, from experimental design to data analysis will be discussed.

Course Instructors:

Madhu Lal-Nag, Ph.D., Team Leader, RNAi Screening, National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health

• Basics of 3D culture: importance of cell line maintenance, culture medium and substratum
• Developing multicellular 3D models
• Evaluating models for high-throughput screens
• Types of assays we have used and are developing

Geoffrey A. Bartholomeusz, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director, siRNA Core Facility, Department of Experimental Therapeutics, Division of Cancer Medicine, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

• Advantage of 3D models over 2D models in cancer biology
• Developing multi-cellular 3D cell culture models for high throughput screening
• Challenges of data interpretation of high throughput screens utilizing 3D spheroid models
• Future developments of 3D models for drug screens, co-culture 3D structures utilizing biopsy samples

Arvind Rao, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

• Challenges in data analysis and image processing
• Data analysis paradigms: PCA, clustering, classification
• Data integration across imaging and genomics for identifying modulators of disease-associated phenotype

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