I-Corps: Rapid 3D Extrusion of Synthetic Tumor Microenvironments

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Solid tumors house an assortment of complex and dynamically changing microenvironments in which signaling events between multiple cell types are known to play a critical role in tumor progression, invasion, and metastasis. To deepen the understanding of this biology, it is desirable to accurately model these structures in vitro for basic studies and for drug screening. However, current systems fall short of mimicking the complex organization of cells and matrix in vivo. The vision for this technology is toward the development and commercialization of more biologically-relevant models for paracrine loop signaling, particularly with regards to cancer metastasis. This I-Corps team believes that the proposed technology can be utilized in high-throughput drug screening platforms that take seconds to manufacture tissue scaffolds and only a few days of incubation to monitor cell-coupled migration effects. The team also believes that this rapid and biologically-relevant analysis method can also be applied to determine optimal drug concentrations for pharmaceutical inhibition targeting Tumor Associated Macrophages (TAMs) for personalized medicine, in addition to other cell-coupled migration targets. The technology is currently in the prototyping stage, where this I-Corps team is continuously validating this technology in the breast adenocarcinoma/macrophage system with other drugs and concentrations. The team is also exploring if this technology can be applied to other cell pair systems as a migration tool. As of yet, the team has not taken steps toward commercializing the technology. Through the I-Corps program, the team plans to make contacts with pharmaceutical companies that might be willing to use the proposed technology as a service for a trial run. The team believes that this will ultimately be the technology demonstration required as its minimum viable product. In addition, they plan on further exploring other commercialization routes, such as integrated test kits, in the future.