We are very please to welcome Dr Isabelle Van Seuningen (Director of CANTHER laboratories & Director of ONCOLille Cancer Institute) and Dr Vincent Senez (Research Director CNRS/CANTHER Laboratory/ONCOLille Institute) in our serie of talk about the uses of BIOMIMESYS®. They explain why they use this technology on cancer research with a focus microfluidics.

What made you want to use BIOMIMESYS® technology and for what applications?

Isabelle Van Seuningen : We are looking in fact for a alternative model to hydrogels (such as Matrigel) and we wanted to be able to work on the matrix stiffness, on his composition, to be able to study that on our own co-culture model in the context of pancreatic cancer and tumor stroma interactions, and the role of matrix. Biomimesys appeared really to be the best model to do that.

How did you get to grips with 3D culture with this technology? What are the technical advantages of BIOMIMESYS® for you?

Isabelle Van Seuningen : In fact we are use to use 96-well plate format to do cell culture so Biomimesys being in the same format. It was very easy for us to apply it to our projects on pancreatic cancer. We will show you (below) some illustrations of the Biomimesys matrix in our co-culture system in the microfluidic device we are developing with Vincent Senez.

human pancreatic cancer cells Capan-2
Culture of human pancreatic cancer cells Capan-2 in the microfluidic device filled with BIOMIMESYS® matrix (Courtesy of CANTHER Laboratory)

In your opinion, what are the benefits of BIOMIMESYS® specific to your application? Have you had interesting and relevant results?

Vincent Senez : Yes, in fact with Biomimesys you can tailor very precisely the composition of the matrix, and we know that in cancer tissues there is a great heterogeneity both in chemical composition as well as in stiffness and pressure inside the tumor. We can really tune all of these parameters with Biomimesys and this is the only product on the market we found to be able to do that

Would you recommend BIOMIMESYS® to other researchers?

Vincent Senez : As you can see, we are developing such kind of microdevices and it’s really easy to integrate Biomimesys in these microdevices. I would say to researchers working in the field of microfluidics for cancer research to try by themselves. It’s very easy to do and then see what are the effects of the properties of Biomimesys on their 3D cell cultures

Isabelle Van Seuningen : So yes like Vincent said, yes, I would definitely recommend the Biomimesys matrix to other researchers working on cancer.


Grégory MAUBON

Grégory MAUBON is Chief Data Officer and digital coordinator at HCS Pharma, a biotech startup focused in high content screening and complex diseases. He manages IT missions and leads digital usages linked to company needs. He is also a Augmented Reality Evangelist (presenter and lecturer) since 2008, where he created www.augmented-reality.fr and founded in 2010 RA'pro (the augmented reality promotion association). He helped many companies (in several domains) to define precisely their augmented reality needs and supported them in the implementation.

0 Comments

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.