Monocyte infiltration and differentiation in 3d multicellular spheroid cancer models

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Natasha Helleberg Madsen
  • Boye Schnack Nielsen
  • Son Ly Nhat
  • Skov, Søren
  • Monika Gad
  • Jesper Larsen

Tumor-associated macrophages often correlate with tumor progression, and therapies targeting immune cells in tumors have emerged as promising treatments. To select effective therapies, we established an in vitro 3D multicellular spheroid model including cancer cells, fibroblasts, and monocytes. We analyzed monocyte infiltration and differentiation in spheroids generated from fi-broblasts and either of the cancer cell lines MCF-7, HT-29, PANC-1, or MIA PaCa-2. Monocytes rapidly infiltrated spheroids and differentiated into mature macrophages with diverse phenotypes in a cancer cell line-dependent manner. MIA PaCa-2 spheroids polarized infiltrating monocytes to M2-like macrophages with high CD206 and CD14 expression, whereas monocytes polarized by MCF-7 spheroids displayed an M1-like phenotype. Monocytes in HT-29 and PANC-1 primarily obtained an M2-like phenotype but also showed upregulation of M1 markers. Analysis of the secretion of 43 soluble factors demonstrated that the cytokine profile between spheroid cultures differed con-siderably depending on the cancer cell line. Secretion of most of the cytokines increased upon the addition of monocytes resulting in a more inflammatory and pro-tumorigenic environment. These multicellular spheroids can be used to recapitulate the tumor microenvironment and the phenotype of tumor-associated macrophages in vitro and provide more realistic 3D cancer models allowing the in vitro screening of immunotherapeutic compounds.

Original languageEnglish
Article number969
JournalPathogens
Volume10
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

    Research areas

  • 3D cancer cell models, Drug screening, In vitro assay, Multicellular spheroids, Tumor microenvironment, Tumor-associated macrophages

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 276901453