Peering into a more human petri dish

Cell culture media, the cocktail of chemicals and nutrients that keep cells alive and thriving in a dish, have been an essential tool of biology for more than 70 years.

Remarkably, the composition of these potions hasn't fundamentally changed much over that time, primarily because they deliver what scientists need: Cells that stay viable and rapidly divide.

But Jason Cantor is thinking about cell culture media from another angle: Can we make it more human?

Cantor, a metabolism investigator at the for Research Morgridge Institute and assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a pioneer in the new development of "physiologic media," which are intended to place laboratory cells into an environment that very closely mimics real biological conditions.

A few years ago, while at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Cantor was part of a team in the laboratory of David M. Sabatini that developed human plasma-like medium (HPLM), a project that painstakingly recreated many of the common biochemical characteristics of adult human plasma.

HPLM is now being used experimentally across more than 30 labs on a variety of research projects, and has the potential to provide broad scientific value as a basic research tool.