Biotechnology advances at a furious pace, yet for the most part, cell culture remains fixed in the past. Over the last decade, however, a new technology has emerged that models the microgravity of space--and it's allowing some researchers to go where no researchers have gone before.
The Rotary Cell Culture System™ (RCCS), invented at NASA and introduced commercially by Houston-based Synthecon in 1990, uses motion to launch cells into a three-dimensional (3-D) orbital dance and a near- weightless environment in which they tend to interact, differentiate, and grow. Fragile cell and tissue cultures that won't grow in other culture systems tend to bloom into complex, large-scale, 3-D constructs.
"If you recognize that cells exist in three dimensions in tissues, why would it not make sense to grow them that way?" posits Synthecon's chief scientist Stephen S. Navran, who first saw the NASA prototype during his tenure at the Baylor College ...
