3-D In Vitro Studies Of Cancer Metastasis

The number of people who died from cancer each year reaches seven millions in the world.The main cause for the death is metastasis of cancer.More and more scientists are devoted to the cancer research currently.However,there are still many limitations for the study,and the motility rates of cancer are not decreased dramatically.Therefore,scientists start to break the limitations existed in the field of traditional medical and biological research,in which researchers take the traditional technologies and study cancer from the view of genetics and mutations.As a result,scientists from physics start to focus the physical structure and microenvironment surrounding the cancer site from a relative macro view of physics to study the cancer metastasis.This project mainly focuses on cancer metastasis study with different in vitro models constructed of DNA hydrogel and collagen I hydrogel.Malignant cancer cell MDA-MB-231 with high invasion rate and benign tumor cell MCF-10 A without obvious invasion were used as model cells to study the cell migration,morphology,and metastasis within the proper microenvironment in the in vitro models.It was found that migration modes of tumor cells on the hydrogel surface,which is similar to the microenvironment in vivo,are quite different from that in the traditional two-dimensional and three-dimensional culture system.Cell-migration on hydrogel surface turns out to be related to the stiffness of the substrate,and the migration of malignant cancer cells is much more sensitive to the hydrogel stiffness than non-invasive cells.These findings have important biophysical meaning,and also provide fundamental research results to assist the clinical therapy.