While medicine has advanced in leaps and bounds in the past hundred years, some of the mechanisms and tools used in the early stages of drug creation haven't changed as much as you'd think.

The Petri dish was created in the late 1880s and has been used in a similar form since. Cell culture, the process of growing and maintaining cells outside of their natural environment (basically, a living human) and a critical tool in developing drugs, has mostly stayed the same since major advances in the 1940s and '50s.

"The way that we culture cells and the way we test pharmaceuticals and things like that, a lot of the core parts of it haven't changed in a pretty long time. The Petri dish has been around forever," said Dr. Christine Trinkle, CEO of Cellect Microfluidics and associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Kentucky, specializing in fluid mechanics and bioengineering/biomechanics.

"A lot of cell culture essentially revolves around an elevated form of the Petri dish and culturing cells in these flat bland landscapes, and then hitting them with drugs and hoping that they behave the same way that they would in vivo (in a living organism)," she explained. "There are obvious problems with that, but people hadn't really been addressing that for a long time because we didn't have the tools to do that."

While earning her PhD at the University of California Berkeley, Dr. Trinkle began her journey of helping engineers and cell biologists work together to find better ways to culture cells and develop better lab models of cells and human organs. Through the creation of her microfluidic-enabled cell culture system, she's doing just that. Cellect Microfluidics' product has implications for pharmaceutical purposes but also can help biologists deepen their understanding of body systems at a cellular level.

"Where a petri dish and multi-well plates fall flat is that they're this bland plastic landscape," she explained. "They don't have a three-dimensional structure to them, which obviously is what the cells see in vivo (in a living body). They're used to having neighbors to the sides and above and below, they're used to having very different mechanics around them. And they're also used to having a circulatory system. Our circulatory system does a lot for maintaining a constant level of food and waste and signaling molecules and things in different tissues throughout the body."

"When we talk about in vitro cell culture—the typical petri dish or multi-well plate cell culture—we lose that three-dimensional nature and we lose the circulatory system. Our device basically is an attempt to build those two things back in and to try to make a platform that's really easy to use."

While others have worked to move the needle forward on cell culture systems, Dr. Trinkle's product combines an easy-to-use fluid three-dimensional environment, high throughput capabilities (a process in drug development that uses automation to quickly test cell reactions to molecules on a large scale), and the ability to remove the cells from the device.

"That's actually a big problem with a lot of what's out there on the market now is that once you put cells in there, that's it. They're basically encased in this plastic or glass system, and you can't ever get them back out," she said.

"That's problematic because if you think of all the different ways that you can test cells and interact with cells, most of them require physical access, most of them require being able to get access to the DNA, the RNA, and the proteins that are inside. A lot of cases where people are growing organoids, the organoid is the product. (Researchers) want to be able to get the organoid back out and then do something else with it."

Through the UAccel program, Dr. Trinkle finessed the product and direction of her technology through interviews with potential customers to fully understand what they need in the lab. With these conversations, she knows this product could make quite an impact.

"There's two big picture goals," she said. "One is to do better drug development and discovery and testing. If you're looking to develop an anti-cancer drug, if you can better simulate what a tumor sees and responds to, then you can better screen for compounds. From a pharmaceutical development standpoint, there's a lot there as far as being able to recreate the in vivo environment more accurately.

"The other big thing is: this can help us answer some basic biology questions because now we can build up these mini tissue analogs and study fundamentals of how the cells talk to each other. Both chemically and mechanically, how are they interacting? Really looking at basic development, growth, and biological processes."

Now, Dr. Trinkle is working on developing a prototype of the device and aims to get these in the hands of researchers to gain feedback. She's also seeking potential collaborators and additional funding.

"We know that traditional culture is not great, but it's just what we've had," she said "so it's neat to see the different ways we're getting past that."

By: Erin Shea

Launch Blue nurtures promising startup founders and university innovators through intensive accelerator and incubator programs. Its funding partners are the University of Kentucky: Office of Technology Commercialization, KY Innovation, the U.S. Economic Development Administration, and the National Science Foundation.