Multicellular tumor spheroids

What are spheroids

Multicellular tumor spheroids are cell assemblies that are grown in 3D, in order to mimick tissue organization. These are used in order to provide a more realistic in-vitro tumor, compared to 2D Petri dish culture.

Our contribution: We have adressed the estimation of mechanical properties of spheroids, in different time-scales and experimental setups. First it is well known that stored stress is accumulated during the growth of microtumors. This stress was estimated from experiments where the spheroids are cut. Second, on a larger time scale the growing tissues behave like a viscoelastic fluid and we have proposed a model that is adapted to experiments of fusion of spheroids. At last, a more elaborate model was designed in order to account for proliferation gradients since the cells located inside the spheroid have less access to numtriments.

More details:

Th. Colin, G. Dechristé, J. Fehrenbach, L. Guillaume, V Lobjois, C. Poignard Experimental estimation of stored stress within spherical microtissues- What can and cannot be inferred from cutting experiments, J. Math. Biol., 77 (2018)

G. Dechristé, J. Fehrenbach, E. Griseti, V. Lobjois, C. Poignard Viscoelastic modeling of the fusion of multicellular tumor spheroids in growth phase, J. Th. Biol. 454 (2018)

T. Michel, J. Fehrenbach, V. Lobjois, J. Laurent, T. Colin, C. Poignard Mathematical modeling of the proliferation gradient in multicellular tumor spheroids J. Th. Biol., 458 (2018)

L. Guillaume, L. Rigal, J. Fehrenbach, C. Severac, B. Ducommun, V. Lobjois Characterization of the physical properties of tumor-derived spheroids reveals critical insights for pre-clinical studies , Sc. Reports, 9 (2019)