ETH-Zürich: Multi-well plate for 3D cell cultures

Licensing Opportunity

Scientists at ETH-Zürich have developed a novel multi-well plate with removable bottom for three-dimensional cell cultures.  The invention is available for licensing.

In the multi-well plate, the cavities are each formed by a rigid wall and a flat bottom part being hermetically bonded to the cavity wall and sectionable from the wall along its rim. To transfer a three-dimensional culture, the bottom part of the cavity is detached from the cavity wall with a suitable device. The three-dimensional culture remains on the detached bottom part and can be transferred.

The multi-well plate also comprises drawer elements arranged on the bottom part of the plate frame structure. During normal handling, the drawer elements remain in an inserted position. For transferring a culture, the drawer elements are retracted. After removing the culture, the drawer elements are closed again.

This multi-well plate allows sample transfer of three-dimensional cell cultures rapidly and without implying any mechanical stress or physical deformation of the three-dimensional structures.

Main Advantages

Multi-well plates according to this invention are suitable as disposable labware. The transferring method for cells or three-dimensional tissue cultures as described in the invention, can be carried out in a standardized, automatable, reproducible and fast manner in order to increase throughput and to decrease costs and time.

Field of Application

• Three-dimensional cell cultures, e.g. stem cell collagen cultures
• Organotypic cultures
• Tissue engineering and regeneration
• Scaffold generation and synthesis
• Three-dimensional cultures of organs or parts of organs, e.g. chicken spinal cord in a garose matrix

Patent Status

• Patent pending

Background

To cultivate and/or investigate a number of cell cultures in parallel, multi-well culture plates are used, consisting of a plate body having 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 384, or 1536 wells. The size of the wells, the distance between the rows and columns, as well as the height, length and width of said multi-well plates are standardized. Whereas the use of multi-well plates for cultivating cells in liquid media is very convenient and highly automatable, this is so far not the case for three-dimensional culture types, as for example three-dimensional collagen stem cell cultures.

At present, there are only few ways to transfer a three-dimensional culture from the culture well to a second device, e.g. an embedding mold, for example by simply turning the plate upside down or by removing the sample culture lifting it with forceps.

All the current techniques lead to mechanical stress and physical deformation of the three-dimensional cell culture. In addition, the known techniques are time consuming, can only be carried out manually and lack reproducibility. As a consequence, culturing of three-dimensional cell samples cannot be standardized to the same degree as it is possible for cultures in liquid media.

Ref. No. T-08-001