Project overview

State of the art

Patient-derived 3D cell cultures could transform personalized cancer medicine by allowing therapies to be tested directly on realistic models of an individual patient’s tumour. However, their widespread use is limited by current monitoring methods. Conventional microscopy provides limited information about the internal organization of optically dense 3D tissues, while advanced imaging techniques are often expensive, computationally demanding or dependent on fluorescent labels. Existing electrical impedance platforms enable continuous monitoring but are well established only on 2D cell cultures, and are difficult to scale across large numbers of 3D tumour models.

A new monitoring approach is therefore needed to address three key questions:

• How can electrical currents be focused through the entire volume of a 3D cell culture?
• Which impedance signals reveal tissue organization, cellular junctions and functional responses?
• How can these measurements be performed in real time across large arrays of cultures?

The MITO approach

MITO aims to develop a scalable platform for the real-time, label-free electrical impedance microtomography of 3D cell cultures. The project combines microstructured polymeric microwells with arrays of organic mixed ionic-electronic devices. Conductive and biocompatible microstructures will guide ionic currents through different regions of the cellular aggregate, while multifrequency impedance measurements and reconstruction algorithms will generate information about its three-dimensional organization and function. The technology will be validated using 3D tumour models exposed to emerging cellular therapies. By enabling multiple cultures to be monitored in parallel, MITO could accelerate personalized treatment testing, improve the development of new medicines and reduce reliance on animal experiments.

Funding Scheme

MITO is a 36-month Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Global Postdoctoral Fellowship (grant agreement n°101201836). The project consists of a 24-month outgoing phase at ETH Zurich, Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering, in Basel, Switzerland, followed by a 12-month return phase at the University of Bologna, Department of Physics and Astronomy, in Bologna, Italy.