Abstract
Current hepatocyte models do not mimic the human liver morphology and functions properly and, therefore, drug metabolism, excretion, and toxicity in the liver are inadequately predicted. In this study, we established three-dimensional (3D) hepatic cell cultures in hydrogels of peptide nanofibers. The aim was to establish an improved 3D phenotype of HepG2 cells. In 3D hydrogel cultures, HepG2 cells formed multicellular spheroids that displayed filamentous actin accumulation and large tubular bile canalicular structures indicative of apicobasal cell polarity. Confocal imaging revealed the multidrug resistance-associated protein 2 (MRP2) and the multidrug resistance protein 1 (MDR1) localization on the bile canalicular membrane, and vectorial transport of fluorescent probes into bile canalicular structures. We conclude that 3D HepG2 cultures exhibited structural and functional polarity, suggesting that this model may be useful in drug research. This study shows the potential of 3D peptide nanofiber biomaterials in optimizing the cellular phenotype in organotypic cultures.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
