Abstract

Organ-on-a-Chip Models for Cancer Research

Séverine Le Gac, Professor, Applied Microfluidics for Bioengineering Research, University of Twente

Organ-on-a-chip (OoC) technology has become a game-changer by providing advanced in vitro models of human tissues and organs, allowing thereby conducting a variety of experimentation and assays, ranging from drug testing, toxicity screening, tissue engineering, to disease modeling to, e.g., elucidate mechanisms at play in disease onset and progression. Organ-on-a-chip devices are hybrid models combining cells and microfabricated structures in a microfluidic format, aiming altogether to mimic functional and/or structural features of an organ. OoCs exhibit a number of advantages compared to conventional in vitro and in vivo models: an in vivo–like and tunable microenvironment, dynamic culture, possibility to incorporate a variety of (bio)chemical and (bio)physical cues, with spatial and temporal control thereon, suitability to prepare patient-specific (disease) model, amenability to parallelized and automated studies, and compatibility with routine imaging and molecular assay. As such, OoC is currently acknowledged as a promising technology to reduce and replace experimentation on animals, which are poor mimics of human diseases and physiology. In my presentation, I will discuss recent work from our group in the field of cancer research: to develop tumor models including different features found in the tumor microenvironment in vivo; to evaluate the penetration of nanomedicines in multi-cellular tumor spheroids, in the presence of a flow or under the assistance of microbubbles and ultrasound activation; to assess the impact of (bio)mechanical cues on a tumor model; and to study cancer metastasis using a multi-organ-on-a-chip approach.