Transform
your research

Mera System

Overview

Hooke Bio’s Mera has the ability to culture, drug and stain 3D microtissues at higher throughput than existing technologies while analysing physiological metrics relevant to drug functionality and toxicity in real time through a fully automated integrated fluorescent microscope.

To benchmark Mera against existing 3D culture systems, a variety of microtissues or spheroids have been cultured on the bioconsumable plate in Mera and compared to microtissues grown on a microplate in an incubator. Mera is cell agnostic and can accommodate any cell type within its plates. Microtissues are stained on Mera with Calcein AM (response shown in green indicating good viability) and EthD-1 (response shown in red indicating low levels of apoptosis) and the responses detected using an in-built fluorescent optics system. In addition to viability, the recirculation fluidics can support inter-microtissue signalling mimicking the fluidic systems in the human body.

In house image analysis software was developed to facilitate reproducible measurement of physiological responses in microtissues. Toxicity data generated on the Mera system demonstrates that microtissues exposed drug concentrations results in similar levels of cell death in comparison to microtissues cultured in microplates. This process provides more physiologically relevant data due to the flow conditions that the microtissues are exposed to within Mera.