ZEISS Lightfield 4D for High-Content Tumor Microtissue Screening: From Reliable and Scalable 3D Models to Quantitative Insights
August 18, 2026
11:00 AM EST / 08:00 AM PST
Abstract
Tumor microtissues and other 3D tumor models capture drug response more faithfully than 2D monolayers but quantifying that response across a full plate is slow because conventional confocal imaging builds each volume one z-slice at a time. This webinar presents a rapid 3D imaging workflow that removes that bottleneck. Peter Favreau (ZEISS) and Olivier Frey (InSphero) discuss InSphero’s highly reproducible and robust spheroid cultures, and their application in a 384-well tumor microtissue screen of drug-treated colorectal tumor/fibroblast co-cultures. These co-cultures were imaged volumetrically on the ZEISS LSM Lightfield 4D, which captures each microtissue's entire 3D structure in a single snapshot, with no z-stack required. Tumor microtissues were analyzed in full 3D with ZEISS arivis Pro. The webinar will show how the workflow resolves dose-dependent, tumor-selective drug response at screening scale, and why 2D projections can systematically undercount cells in dense 3D tissue models in ways that distort quantitative results.
KEY LEARNINGS
✓ How Lightfield 4D captures the full 3D volume of a tumor microtissue in a single snapshot, removing the serial z-sectioning bottleneck that limits multiwell throughput.
✓ How InSphero’s reproducible 384-well tumor–fibroblast co-cultures, human relevant tissue architecture, and screening-compatible plate format support statistically meaningful drug-response studies at scale.
✓ Model, assay, and sample-prep factors essential for robust 3D imaging data.
✓ How full-volume 3D analysis in arivis Pro quantifies dose-dependent, tumor-selective drug response and why 2D maximum-intensity projections recovered 2–2.5× fewer cells from the same data.
✓ How a "screen-then-interrogate" workflow moves seamlessly from rapid Lightfield 4D screening to high-resolution Airyscan follow-up on the same LSM 990 platform.
Webinar Resources
ZEISS New Approach Methodologies Applications (NAMs)
Explore ZEISS tumor models & NAMs imaging
Discover InSphero's 3D in vitro Platform
Learn about InSphero's reliable and scalable 3D in-vitro technology
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