Kumar and Murthy create hydrogel for fast cell culture studies

Bioengineering professors Sanjay Kumar and Niren Murthy have collaborated to develop a new materials technology that allows them to simultaneously create many cell culture environments with defined material properties for high-throughput analysis.
Material properties such as stiffness and adhesivity are known to influence cell behavior, but creating the huge number and diversity of materials needed to quantitatively understand this regulation had been prohibitively labor-intensive. The researchers in Kumar and Murthy labs were able to use this new system to quantify for the first time how material stiffness regulates the levels of a cancer-relevant microRNA called miR18a in brain tumor cells, and to study how these material-dependent responses are modulated by factors that are secreted by specific immune cells.

This research was published in Nature Communications.