Project: Building a better Petri dish

His goal was to grow more realistic cells.

PROVIDENCE JOURNAL

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Tinkering with one of the most established technologies in research laboratories, a graduate student at Brown University says he has devised a better Petri dish.

Traditional Petri dishes, having provided a cozy home to microorganisms for more than 130 years, are a staple of any lab. Even the most science-phobic student can pick one out of a lineup, along with its longtime companion, the microscope.

But Brown doctoral student Anthony Napolitano, 30, was not satisfied.

Before enrolling in 2003, Napolitano worked at Ortec International in New York, producing artificial skin. Although the flat Petri dish promotes rapid cell growth, he found, it does not create an environment that resembles conditions in the human body and that can produce cells that look and behave like actual human cells.

In the round, plastic trays, Napolitano said, cells settle into a flat layer, where they stick to the bottom of the Petri dish, instead of to each other.

“The cells on the Petri dish,” Napolitano said, “don’t always act the way they do in a body.”

At Brown, Napolitano set out to improve that design in the hopes of growing more realistic cells. The result is a nonadhesive, three-dimensional Petri dish that Brown hopes to patent and market worldwide.

Following years of experimentation using computer modeling and various assembly methods, Napolitano has created a clear Petri dish the size of a silver dollar and built of agarose, an inexpensive substance derived from seaweed.

Instead of an open campground for microorganisms, it is more like a college dormitory, with cells clustering in 800 separate wells at the bottom of the tray.

Instead of forming a flat layer at the bottom, the nearly 1,000 cells that settle into each microenvironment interact and self-assemble into three-dimensional micro-tissues.

“People are realizing that 3-D is the way to go,” Napolitano said. “It could impact many areas.”

Studies have shown that the shape, function and growth patterns of cells cultured in traditional Petri dishes differ compared with cells grown in a 3-D environment, according to Napolitano’s adviser, Jeffrey Morgan, who is overseeing the project.

Patent applications are pending and Brown has not yet identified a licensing partner to mass produce and market the 3-D Petri dish.

Already, Napolitano’s research has been published in the journal Tissue Engineering, and researchers who have used it at Brown are reporting positive results.

“People are pretty excited about it,” said Dylon Dean, 29, a medical student and doctoral candidate at Brown who is working with Napolitano. If successful, Napolitano said, the new Petri dish could reduce reliance on animal studies.

It could also save pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars, he said, by improving the accuracy of laboratory testing.