Photodynamic therapy (PDT) involves interaction of a photosensitizer, light, and molecular oxygen which produces singlet oxygen and subsequent tumour eradication. The development of second generation photosensitizers, such as phthalocyanines, has improved this technology. Customary monolayer cell culture techniques are, unfortunately, too simple to replicate treatment effects in vivo. Multicell...

Evodiamine (EVO) and rutaecarpine (RUT) are promising anti-tumor drug candidates. The evaluation of the anti-proliferative activity and cellular uptake of EVO and RUT in 3D multicellular spheroids of cancer cells would better recapitulate the native situation and thus better reflect an in vivo response to the treatment. Herein, we employed the 3D culture of MCF-7 and SMMC-7721 cells based on ha...

Retinal cells from chick embryos aged 7.5 days of gestation were cultured for two months in a non-adherent suspension culture dish to study the effects of growth factors and co-culture with retinal pigment epithelial cells on their differentiation. Dissociated retinal cells became cellular aggregates (multicellular spheroids) within a day, and rosettes were formed in the spheroids after 2 days....

Multicellular three-dimensional (3D) spheroids represent an experimental model that is intermediate in its complexity between monolayer cultures and patients' tumor. In the present study, we characterize multicellular spheroids from papillary (PTC) and follicular (FTC) thyroid cancers and from the corresponding normal tissues. We show that these 3D structures well recapitulate the features of t...

Background: Several cell lines when cultured under proper condition can form three dimensional structures called multicellular tumor spheroids. Tumor spheroids are valuable in vitro models for studying physical and biological behavior of real tumors. A number of previous studies using a variety of techniques have shown no relationship between radiosensitivity and DNA strand breaks in monolayer ...

Multicellular resistance, a subtype of therapeutic resistance manifested in cancer cells grown as three-dimensional multicellular masses, such as spheroids in vitro and solid tumors in vivo, occurs with respect to a variety of anticancer treatment strategies including chemotherapy, ionizing radiation, and even host-mediated antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity. Previous studies from our lab...

Recently, many types of in vitro 3-D culture systems have been developed to recapitulate the in vivo growth conditions of cancer. The cancer 3-D culture methods aim to preserve the biological characteristics of original tumors better than conventional 2-D monolayer cultures, and include tumor-derived organoids, tumor-derived spheroids, organotypic multicellular spheroids, and multicellular tumo...

Cancer cells frequently fail to respond to chemotherapy due to acquisition of chemoresistance. Tumour cells are prone to die by necrosis when they are metabolically stressed by hypoxic and glucose depletion (OGD) due to insufficient vascularization, a common feature of solid tumours. Tumour necrosis indicates poor prognosis and emergence of drug resistance in cancer patients; however, its molec...