The present invention provides a technique for efficiently aggregating a polymer such as ECM together with cells.
A method for preparing a polymer-loaded cell or cell aggregate, comprising adding a solution containing a polymer and at least one cell to a medium containing a swellable material to thereby aggregate the polymer together with the cell. A method for controlling the property and/or the function of a cell or a cell aggregate, comprising culturing the polymer-loaded cell or cell aggregate prepared by the above-described method. A method for culturing a cell or a cell aggregate, comprising: preparing a polymer capsule filled with a cell or a cell aggregate by adding a solution containing a polymer and at least one cell to a medium containing a swellable material to thereby aggregate the polymer together with the cell; and culturing the cell or cell aggregate within the capsule.
For constructing 3D cell tissues, a method using U-bottom 96-well plates or the hanging-drop method is conventionally used. In the present invention, 2000 cells can be mixed with 1 μl of ECM-containing medium so that ECM and the cells are allowed to aggregate simultaneously. When the efficiency in this case is taken as 1, ECM can only be mixed in 3D cell tissues at a calculated efficiency of approx. 1/12000 in the method using U-bottom 96-well plates or approx. 1/2400 in the hanging drop method. Therefore, according to the present invention, it is possible to reduce the cost of ECM can be reduced to about several thousand to ten thousand times less. Besides, it is possible to efficiently use artificial ECM that cannot be synthesized in a large quantity or rare ECM that can only be extracted in an extremely small quantity for such a reason that the source is a small organism.