Microfluidic Platform Shows how Cancer Cells Invade Organs

Statistics show that close to 70 percent of patients with advanced breast cancer will experience skeletal metastasis, in which cancer cells migrate to a primary tumor or bone and cause the development of painful fractures and spinal compression. However, much is still unknown about how and why certain cancers spread to various organs and parts of the body.

Yet a recent study takes a three-dimensional look at microfluidic platforms that mimic the spread of breast cancer cells into a bonelike environment using a microchip-a small device that contains several channels to grow endothelial cells and bone cells that mimic blood vessel and bone side-by-side.

After a period of 24 hours, researchers from MIT, Italy, and South Korea found that twice as many cancer cells had made their way through the vessel walls. Worse yet, by the experiment's fifth day, bonelike settings had formed microclusters of up to 60 cancer cells.

"You can see how rapidly they are growing," Jessie Jeon, a graduate student in mechanical engineering said, via a press release. "We only waited until day five, but if we had gone longer, [the size of the clusters] would have been overwhelming." 

According to background information from the study, the team also identified two molecules that may encourage cancer cells to metastasize: CXCL5, a protein ligand secreted by bone cells, and CXCR2, a receptor protein on cancer cells that binds to the ligand. 

Though researchers note, via the release, that the results are still preliminary, the microchip could potentially be used in the future to test certain cancer drugs.

"Currently, we don't understand why certain cancers preferentially metastasize to specific organs," Kamm concluded, via the release. "An example is that breast cancer will form metastatic tumors in bone, but not, for example, muscle. Why is this, and what factors determine it? We can use our model system both to understand this selectivity, and also to screen for drugs that might prevent it."

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More information regarding the study can be found via the journal Biomaterials.