Student invents a better Petri dish

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.

But 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 doesn’t create an environment that resembles conditions in the body and 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 don’t always act the way they do in a body,” he said.

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.

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, the nearly 1,000 cells that settle into each microenvironment interact and self-assemble into three-dimensional micro-tissues.

Studies have shown that the shape, function and growth patterns of cells cultured in traditional Petri dishes differ from cells grown in a 3-D environment, said Napolitano’s adviser, Jeffrey Morgan.

If successful, Napolitano said, the new Petri dish could reduce reliance on animal studies.

It could also save pharmaceutical companies billions, he said, by improving the accuracy of lab testing. Using current Petri dishes, Napolitano said, many experimental drugs appear to function in the lab, only to fail during costly studies with animals or humans.