Large-scale production of functional and miniaturized spheroids for drug screening

Heshuang Qu², Salomé Thüler², Yacine Bounab¹, Stéphanie van Loo1, Quentin Graillet1, Brinton Seashore-Ludlow² and Piia Mikkonen³

¹LiveDrop SA , Belgium, ²Karolinska Institute and SciLifeLab, Sweden, ³ UPM Biomedicals, Finland

Spheroids have emerged as indispensable tools for both research and industry, offering improved physiological relevance,accelerated drug screening, and enhanced toxicity assessment in comparison to traditional 2D cultures. However, currentmethods like hanging drop micro-plates suffer from labor-intensive processes, high costs, and poor reproducibility, limiting theirscalability for large-scale screening studies. Moreover, traditional large spheroids pose significant challenges for reproducibleanalysis when using microscopy imaging techniques.

To overcome these challenges, we have developed a streamlined workflow combining the high-throughput miniaturizedspheroid production capabilities of the OneFlow™ or ModaFlow™ LiveDrop’s microfluidics instruments with the advantageousproperties of GrowDex® hydrogel from UPM Biomedicals.

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