Heidolph Sphericalplate 5D - 24 Well

Heidolph Sphericalplate 5D - 24 Well

The spherical plate 5D (SP5D) is a 3D cell culture plate for the formation of uniform, standardized spheroids with high quality and yield. It allows the effortless scaling and translation into the diagnostic or clinical application. At the same time, the reproducibility of follow-up tests increases, since the experiments always start under identical initial conditions due to the low size variance of the cultivated spheroids.

The patented geometry with special coating allows the integration of every single cell into a 3D-agglomerate in a controlled way. This is how uniformly sized spheroids grow without the formation of necrotic cores. According to the size and scale of the experiments, you can choose between our 24-well plate or our 6-well plate.

For small batches, we suggest using the 24-well plate containing 12 wells with 750 microwells each. Here, you will be able to yield up to 9,000 uniform spheroids. Furthermore, you can comfortably carry out monolayer comparative studies in the remaining 12 wells of the same plate.

The 6-well plate is suitable for scale-up trials and bigger batches. You can expect a yield of 3,364 spheroids per well, thus a total yield of 20,184 spheroids per plate.

The ready to use SP5D is particularly user-friendly: The cultivation does not require any pretreatment or centrifugation steps after seeding your cells. The media change is also particularly convenient due to simple pipetting, since the height of the microwells was chosen so that the cell clusters are retained. Moreover, the platform is compatible with standard automation units.

To find out how easy it is to work with the Sphericalplate 5D, watch our video here!

Functional Principle

Standardized, uniform, size controlled spheroids in high yield.

750 cell clusters with a single pipette move - 9,000 per plate.

When developing the SP5D, the goal was to create the most realistic physiological environment possible for growing standardized spheroids with the possibility of cell-to-cell communication without external interfering signals. At the same time, the plate should allow real-time imaging and monitoring within the platform, be scalable and convenient to use.

These requirements are met by the following features of the SP5D:

• Patented, three-dimensional geometry with rounded bottoms of the microwells, resulting in scaffold-free, regular spheroid formation while keeping the aggregate in the center
• no sharp edges at the bottom of the plate to reduce surface-induced, non-physiological differentiation
• sharp edges at the top of the microwells to leave no cell behind
• special angle of the microwells to allow cells descending in consistent numbers without an additional centrifugation step
• patented surface coating to prevent cell-surface signaling during development and eliminates the need for plate pre-treatment
• Surface coating featuring low protein-adhesion to allows perfect cell aggregation
• Aggregate size control through the geometric dimensions of the microwells to avoid hypoxia
• Standardization of geometric cluster size for clinical applications
• Selection of COC (cyclic olefin copolymers) material to enable real-time imaging with less background noise.