Issue 3, 2020

An ovarian spheroid based tumor model that represents vascularized tumors and enables the investigation of nanomedicine therapeutics

Abstract

The failure of cancer therapies in clinical settings is often attributed to the lack of a relevant tumor model and pathological heterogeneity across tumor types in the clinic. The objective of this study was to develop a robust in vivo tumor model that better represents clinical tumors for the evaluation of anti-cancer therapies. We successfully developed a simple mouse tumor model based on 3D cell culture by injecting a single spheroid and compared it to a tumor model routinely used by injecting cell suspension from 2D monolayer cell culture. We further characterized both tumors with cellular markers for the presence of myofibroblasts, pericytes, endothelial cells and extracellular matrix to understand the role of the tumor microenvironment. We further investigated the effect of chemotherapy (doxorubicin), nanomedicine (Doxil®), biological therapy (Avastin®) and their combination. Our results showed that the substantial blood vasculature in the 3D spheroid model enhances the delivery of Doxil® by 2.5-fold as compared to the 2D model. Taken together, our data suggest that the 3D tumors created by simple subcutaneous spheroid injection represents a robust and more vascular murine tumor model which is a clinically relevant platform to test anti-cancer therapy in solid tumors.

Graphical abstract: An ovarian spheroid based tumor model that represents vascularized tumors and enables the investigation of nanomedicine therapeutics

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
09 Nov 2019
Accepted
18 Dec 2019
First published
19 Dec 2019

Nanoscale, 2020,12, 1894-1903

An ovarian spheroid based tumor model that represents vascularized tumors and enables the investigation of nanomedicine therapeutics

M. S. Singh, M. Goldsmith, K. Thakur, S. Chatterjee, D. Landesman-Milo, T. Levy, L. A. Kunz-Schughart, Y. Barenholz and D. Peer, Nanoscale, 2020, 12, 1894 DOI: 10.1039/C9NR09572A

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements