Image: Ángela García Grech y Patricia González Jiménez

📣 Piiiiip! The match begins

Now that the World Cup is about to start, we can’t ignore the similarities between science and football with this Image of the Month. In the same way that a football team can’t be understood by watching players perform alone, cellular function depends strongly on interactions within a collective environment.

📣 Piiiiip! From 2D to 3D

Traditionally, researchers have broadly employed 2D, monolayer cell cultures to study the functions of cells, as well as to perform different assays to analyze and validate different therapeutical strategies. Indeed, their establishment marked a new era in biological research, pushing forward the knowledge of molecular mechanisms and triggering great advances in this field. However, studying cells in 2D environments provides only a partial picture of their true behavior. 2D cell cultures can reproduce most cellular properties, but they do not fully mimic the real conditions found in living organisms. All cells in the body exist in a 3D environment, establishing cell-cell and cell- extracellular matrix (ECM) interactions that are essential for cellular responses. Cells, just like football players, like to team up and play as a group. And just like in football, not every player plays the same position. The position in which they play of influences how they behave, interact with others, and shapes their unique characteristics.

📣 Piiiiip! Teamwork in the cellular field

By growing together instead of alone, cells communicate, cooperate, and create complex structures that are much closer to real life. For these reasons, researchers started to develop 3D cell cultures, which provide a more precise representation of the in vivo environment and fill the gap between 2D culturing and experiments with animals. As a result, they are more reliable for studying cellular behaviors, molecular mechanisms, and drug responses. Among the different 3D cell cultures, we can find spheroids – cell aggregates that form sphere-like structures and mimic the organization of cells in tissues. Spheroids don’t require scaffolding to form 3D cultures, they just simply stick to each other when they are growing in the presence of a surface not compatible for cell attachment. However, they can also be formed using materials that mimic ECM, which act as a scaffold for the cells to grow. Spheroids are promising models in numerous applications, including tissue engineering (vascularization, regeneration), neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer, Parkinson), cancer research (mimicking tumor structure and microenvironment) or drug screening and carrier (testing their delivery, efficacy or assessing cancer drug resistance), among others.