Face Scrubber-Fabricated Affordable and User-Friendly Microwell Devices for Scalable 3D Cell Culture

Abstract

Current 3D culture platforms often face challenges such as high costs, single-use, and inconsistent size uniformity and hence are unsuitable for high-throughput applications. Considering these issues, a commercially available silicone face scrubber (SFS) was repurposed as a device or mold to fabricate microwell arrays in agarose for scalable 3D cell cultures, i.e., spheroids and organoids. The presented approach is simple, rapid, and affordable and does not require any expert personnel or instruments for the fabrication of microwell arrays. The efficacy of the method was determined by the performance of microwells toward 3D culture of L6 myoblast spheroids. Microwells facilitated the uniform culture of spheroid arrays without any considerable variation in shape and size. The reported approach is highly flexible and was used to create agarose microwells in 35 mm, 60 mm, and 06-well plates. Furthermore, the SFS-fabricated microwells exhibited 03 rounds of reusability for spheroid generation without significant changes in spheroid morphology and size. The developed strategy significantly reduces experimental costs while preserving spheroid quality, making it ideal for 3D culture applications such as drug screening, disease modelling, tissue engineering, and biomaterials and organoid technology.