A team of researchers at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and Michigan Engineering have developed a microfluidic device that allows them to cultivate cells for longer periods of time, offering insights into how cancer spreads. Their research was published in Scientific Reports yesterday.
According to the team, this new device was stable up to at least three weeks in culture. This is significant as the problem with existing microfluidic devices is that the cells don't last long within them. Devices typically lend themselves to brief experiments of several days.
"A lot of tumor processes like invasion and resistance don't happen overnight. Our goal was to track the long-term evolution of invasion," says lead study author Koh Meng Aw Yong, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow. "We cannot look at just a certain time point, like in a three-day experiment. That might not represent what's happening in the body over time."
The device consists of three tiny molded channels through which cells flow. The cells are fed into one channel. Fluid flows through a parallel channel to provide pressure and flow without disturbing the culture. The flow of fluid through the outer channel mimics what happens with the body's capillaries.
"These forces are important and incorporate everything into one system," Aw Kong explains.
The researchers tested the device with two lines of metastatic prostate cancer cells. They were able to isolate the leader cells, those cells that first broke off and would be traveling to distant organs.
"It's especially important to be able to capture those leader cells and understand their biology—why are they so successful, why are they resistant to traditional chemotherapy and how can we target them selectively?" says study author Sofia Merajver, M.D., Ph.D., scientific director of the Breast Oncology Program at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
After two weeks, they found that the cells from one line were twice as invasive as the other cell line. But by three weeks, that difference was gone, suggesting that the invasive potential of cells may change over time.
The hope is that researchers can find differences in the molecular signature between cells that invade and those that don't. Then, they would target the molecular underpinning with therapies to prevent cancer from invading—essentially keeping the cancer confined and preventing metastasis.
Caption: Cancer cells move through a microfluidic chamber. Image courtesy of Michigan Medicine