CRAFT trainee Nancy T Li, her supervisor Prof. Alison McGuigan and their colleagues have developed a promising new “off-the-shelf” tool for drug screening with the potential to accelerate existing drug discovery pipelines.

This tool, known as Scaffold-supported Platform for Organoid-based Tissues (SPOT), is a high-throughput platform for 3D culturing of engineered microtissues containing patient-derived organoids. SPOT can be reproducibly manufactured in 96- and 384-well formats with materials readily available in many labs and is compatible with existing lab instrumentation and workflows.

Li et al (Biomaterials, 2022) subjected tissues grown in SPOT to standard phenotypic assays and image-based readings as a proof-of-concept. The authors also demonstrated the use of SPOT for drug screening by assessing the sensitivity of organoids derived from pancreatic cancer patients to five chemotherapeutic compounds.

In a more recent publication led by Cao et al (Advanced Healthcare Materials, 2023), Prof. McGuigan’s team and colleagues reported integrating SPOT with an open-source liquid handler to automate SPOT production, tissue culturing, and treatment, as well as imaging and high-dimensional single-cell analysis.

These projects were supported by Medicine by Design, CRAFT and TOeP. Collaborators interested in using 96- or 384-SPOT should connect with Prof. McGuigan. http://www.mcguiganlab.com/alison-mcguigan/

Publications:

Li NT, Wu NC, Cao R, Cadavid JL, Latour S, Lu X, Zhu Y, Mijalkovic M, Roozitalab R, Landon-Brace N, Notta F, McGuigan AP. An off-the-shelf multi-well scaffold-supported platform for tumour organoid-based tissues. Biomaterials. Dec 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biomaterials.2022.121883

Cao R, Li NT, Latour S, Cadavid JL, Tan CM, Forman A, Jackson HW, McGuigan AP. An Automation Workflow for High-Throughput Manufacturing and Analysis of Scaffold-Supported 3D Tissue Arrays. Advanced Healthcare Materials. April 2023. https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.202202422