Adipocyte spheroids offer a promising three-dimensional (3D) cell culture model for obesity research, as they reproduce the structure and cell-cell interaction of adipose tissue more accurately compared to two-dimensional (2D) cultures. However, the mass production of uniform, small adipocyte spheroids remains challenging, limiting their use in large-scale analyses, such as drug screening. Here, we develop a method that combines simple microfluidics with templated emulsification to enable the large-scale production of small, uniform adipocyte spheroids. By encapsulating preadipocytes in hollow agarose microcapsules and incubating them for 2 days, we reproducibly generated more than 100,000 uniform spheroids with diameters of approximately 60 μm. These preadipocytes were subsequently differentiated into adipocyte spheroids through an 8-day induction period. This platform facilitates large-scale 3D analysis for obesity research and can be adapted to produce various other spheroid and organoid models, broadening its utility in biomedical research.
Maekawa et al. (Wed,) studied this question.