Bioengineers have harnessed the lotus effect to develop a system for culturing cancer cell clusters that can shed light on hard-to-study tumor properties.
The new zinc oxide-based culturing surface mimics the lotus leaf surface structure, providing a highly tunable platform for the high-throughput generation of three-dimensional nanoscale tumor models.
The superhydrophobic array device designed by Rice bioengineer Michael King and collaborators can be used to create tunable, compact, physiologically relevant models for studying the progression of cancer, including metastasis -- the stage in the disease when cancerous cells travel through the bloodstream from a primary tumor site to other parts of the body.
"'Safety in numbers' unfortunately also applies to cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream," said Alexandria Carter, a researcher in the King lab who is a co-author on the study."Cancer cells traveling alone are more likely to succumb to shear stress destruction or immune cell attacks. However, when they travel in groups, the likelihood that they successfully reach and settle in other parts of the body increases.
"When Kalana Jayawardana joined our lab as a new postdoctoral fellow in 2018, he started to experiment with growing zinc oxide nanorod surfaces," said King, a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Scholar who recently joined Rice as the E.D. Butcher Chair of Bioengineering and special adviser to the provost on life science collaborations with the Texas Medical Center.
"SHArD is ready to use in biomedical research," Carter said."Any lab with clean room access can follow our protocols and create versions of this platform that meet the exact needs of their specific research projects."
Brain Tumor Lung Cancer Colon Cancer Mice Biology Biotechnology And Bioengineering Developmental Biology
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