breast cancer metastasis 연구를 위한 microfluidic device

"But when cancer metastasizes, cancer cells move through the body, making the disease difficult to treat. We decided to apply our expertise in microfluidics to develop a new tool to aid in studying how cancer cells begin to invade into surrounding tissues in the first steps in metastasis."

Normally metastasis is studied in a petri dish cell culture or in whole animals. However, these model systems present problems in terms of cost, efficiency, or lack of representation.

"An oversimplified system like cells in petri dishes doesn't mimic what happens in the body, while in an animal model, it's difficult to isolate and study parameters that govern the invasiveness of a cell."

The device consists of patterned metal electrodes which can move extremely small droplets around through the use of electric fields. By selectively changing the water-repelling properties of the surface at various points, researchers can 'pinch' off the water droplets and form precise shapes.

In the paper, the researchers describe how they used a collagen matrix coated with a layer of basal membrane extract to mimic the structure of the breast tissue seen by breast cancer cells during the first step of metastasis.

"One interesting thing we observed is that not all cancer cells within the same population have the same invasiveness," says Li, "Some invaded into the tissue mimics while others did not, which prompted us to look at what gives the invaded cells such an advantage."

Li and her team extracted cancer cells at various distances from the invasion point and subjected these cells to genetic sequencing.

"We identified 244 different genes that are differentially expressed between the cancer cells that invaded versus the ones that didn't invade. 

 

논문은 봐도 잘 모르겠다. 집가면서 읽어봐야겠다.

 

referencse

Cell invasion in digital microfluidic microgel systems, Science Advances (2020).