Dynamic optical coherence tomography of mammary epithelial cell spheroids

In vitro mammary epithelial cells (MEC), when 3D cultured in artificial extracellular matrix (aECM), tend to form spheroids that recapitulate many features of the human mammary gland. These 3D MEC cultures can be used as a testbed for understanding the effects of cancer-fighting drugs and potentially cancer-inducing toxicants. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a favorable method to capture label-free high-speed intracellular motility within these energetic cells by merit of their unique speckle fluctuation patterns. This talk will cover what we have learned about developing dynamic OCT-based metrics that elucidate MEC responses to drugs and toxicants, discuss a novel non-uniform sampling method for high throughput studies, and demonstrate an application in longitudinal imaging of MEC spheroids under exposure to polyfluoryl alkyl substances (PFAS), a class of chemicals currently of concern as environmental toxicants.