Making, imaging, and stressing multicellular spheroids and organoids

Hybrid : Zoom + Room B241

We will first introduce the microfluidic technique that we developed to encapsulate cells and generate multicellular spheroids or organoids. We will then focus on selected examples that highlight specific aspects of cell self-assembly and mechanotransduction in 3 dimensions. Technological developments related to the difficulty in imaging spheroids in a high throughput format will be reported. Finally, biomedical applications in oncology and regenerative medicine will be addressed.

Pierre Nassoy defended his PhD in Soft Matter physics at the University of Paris in 1996, after studies at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie de Paris (headed by Pierre-Gilles de Gennes). He then moved to biophysics as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia -advisor: Evan A. Evans). Dr. Nassoy was appointed CNRS junior researcher at the Curie Institute (Paris) in 1999. His research was focused on membrane physics and cell mechanics. In 2012, he moved to Bordeaux to create the BioImaging and Optofluidics lab (http://biof-lab.org/ ) at the Institut d’Optique and reoriented his research activity towards oncophysics and tissue engineering. In 2018, he co-founded Treefrog Therapeutics https://treefrog.fr/ ), a startup dedicated to the production of human induced pluripotent cells and regenerative medicine. In 2022, he was awarded with the CNRS medal of innovation.