3D Hydrogel Cultures for High-Throughput Drug Discovery.

Our increased understanding of how a cell's microenvironment influences its behavior has fueled an interest in three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures for drug discovery. Particularly, scaffold-based 3D cultures are expected to recapitulate in vivo tissue stiffness and extracellular matrix composition more accurately than standard two-dimensional (2D) monolayer cultures. Here we present a 3D hydrogel cell culture setup suitable for automated screening with standard high-throughput screening (HTS) liquid handling equipment commonly found in a drug discovery laboratory. Further, we describe the steps required to validate the assay system for compound screening.