Modeling and measuring glucose diffusion and consumption by colorectal cancer spheroids in hanging drops using integrated biosensors

As 3D in vitro tissue models become more pervasive, their built-in nutrient, metabolite, compound, and waste gradients increase biological relevance at the cost of analysis simplicity. Investigating these gradients and the resulting metabolic heterogeneity requires invasive and time-consuming methods. An alternative is using electrochemical biosensors and measuring concentrations around the tissue model to obtain size-dependent metabolism data. With our hanging-drop-integrated enzymatic glucose biosensors, we conducted current measurements within hanging-drop compartments hosting spheroids formed from the human colorectal carcinoma cell line HCT116. We developed a physics-based mathematical model of analyte consumption and transport, considering (1) diffusion and enzymatic conversion of glucose to form hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)) by the glucose-oxidase-based hydrogel functionalization of our biosensors at the microscale; (2) H(2)O(2) oxidation at the electrode surface, leading to amperometric H(2)O(2) readout; (3) glucose diffusion and glucose consumption by cancer cells in a spherical tissue model at the microscale; (4) glucose and H(2)O(2) transport in our hanging-drop compartments at the macroscale; and (5) solvent evaporation, leading to glucose and H(2)O(2) upconcentration. Our model relates the measured currents to the glucose concentrations generating the currents. The low limit of detection of our biosensors (0.4 ± 0.1 μM), combined with our current-fitting method, enabled us to reveal glucose dynamics within our system. By measuring glucose dynamics in hanging-drop compartments populated by cancer spheroids of various sizes, we could infer glucose distributions within the spheroid, which will help translate in vitro 3D tissue model results to in vivo.