Team sees big potential for new 3-D Petri dishes

BROWN BIOMEDICAL engineering students Anthony Napolitano, left, and Dylan Dean believe the low cost of their 3-D Petri dish will make it a winner in the marketplace. /
BROWN BIOMEDICAL engineering students Anthony Napolitano, left, and Dylan Dean believe the low cost of their 3-D Petri dish will make it a winner in the marketplace. /

A team of Brown University biomedical engineers has developed a new method for growing cells in three dimensions rather than in the traditional two-dimensional Petri dish.

The new, 3-D Petri dish is cheap to manufacture, easy to use and grows cells that behave more like cells in the body, making it useful for researchers developing new drugs and engineering tissues to be transplanted into the body, said Jeffrey Morgan, a Brown professor of medical science and engineering who runs the lab where the technology was developed.

“It’s a new technology with a lot of promise to improve biomedical research,” Morgan said.

The clear, rubbery disc is about a quarter-inch thick and about the diameter of a silver dollar. It is made from a water-based gel made of agarose, a sugar found in seaweed that is widely used in labs.

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In the center of the 3-D Petri dish is an empty chamber filled with hundreds of miniscule wells. Researchers insert a liquid suspension containing about a million cells into the small chamber using a pipette.

Unlike traditional, flat Petri dishes made of plastic, the gel that the disc is made of is non-adhesive, enabling the cells to form natural, three-dimensional cell-to-cell connections, said Dylan Dean, an M.D./Ph.D. graduate student who worked to develop the 3-D Petri dish.

“They settle down into the little nooks and crannies and roll to the bottom and then spontaneously self-assemble into a 3-D little microtissue,” Morgan said.

The 3-D Petri dish enables cells to grow into more than 800 little “microtissues” in a single step that takes about a day, Morgan said. Many labs have developed other types of 3-D Petri dishes, but Morgan’s is the first to develop one made of the inexpensive, widely available agarose gel.

“This one is, we think, the easiest, most inexpensive one, and so we expect it to be widely adopted,” he said.

Brown Technology Partnerships, which handles all of the intellectual property created at the university, has filed a patent application on the 3-D Petri dish and is actively pursuing licensing partners, said Anthony Napolitano, a Ph.D. candidate in the biomedical engineering program who led the team that developed the 3-D Petri dish.

Napolitano, who spent two years perfecting the new dish, wrote a business plan for the 3-D Petri dish after taking an entrepreneurship class at Brown. He recently won a $15,000 award from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance to develop the patent-pending technology into a commercially viable product.

The biggest commercial opportunity for the technology is in drug discovery, within the Petri dish segment of the market, which generates about $100 million in sales annually, Napolitano said.

Specifically, the 3-D Petri dish could be marketed to researchers who currently assemble their own cell culture components rather than buy pre-coated lab wear, he said.

“For literally $1 you can make this kind of Petri dish, where other companies are selling them for $80,” Napolitano said. “There’s some unmet need out there. There’s nothing really that you can buy off the shelf that people really like, that’s really solving the problem.” •

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