Microfluidic careers

Subia Bano & tumor microenvironment | My Microfluidics Career

tumor microenvironment MTOAC tumor on chip organ on chip Elvesys chip Subia Bano1

My microfluidics career – tumor microenvironment

What can you achieve with microfluidics? What are the practical applications of microfluidics to a field of research, and how could microfluidics help your research career?

We asked our own Elveflow research teams for you. Our Microfluidics Careers pages give you a no frills, realistic idea of the wide variety of projects that can benefit from microfluidics.

Subia Bano is working on the MTOAC project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 795754.

What is the most interesting thing about your project?

Breast cancer is the most common invasive cancer among women. There are several chemotherapeutic and radiotherapeutics approaches are available but they have certain limitations.

Over the past few years, improved understanding of the microenvironment heterogeneity of breast cancer has allowed the development of more effective treatment strategies. However, researchers have still not been able to recapitulate the entire tumor microenvironment to study the tumor progression and invasion. In this way, more complex in vitro and in vivo cancer models have been developed. These tumor models have certain limitations.

In this direction, breast tumor-on-chip model has emerged as an alternative system to study the tumor microenvironment and deciphering its role in metastasis. The tumor-on-chip system mimics the exact in vivo conditions, by controlling the user’s defined environmental parameters, and the mechanical and biological signals generated by neighboring cells. This technique will provide a more realistic environment for chemo-sensitivity assay, evaluating the effectiveness of drug delivery, understanding the possibility and potential of multi drug resistance as well as cancer metastasis.

How did you transition from your previous research field to microfluidics?

Previously, I was working on Tissue engineering, Biomaterials, Drug/gene delivery systems to evaluate drug efficacy in 2D and 3D in vitro cancer model.

Microfluidics technology overcomes certain limitations by generating better tumor microenvironment than conventional 2D and 3D culture systems. The microfluidics system will mimic the most precise physiological conditions similar to in vivo, by generating the precise fluidic flow which may induce the mechanical and biological signal generated by cancer and neighboring cells.

By utilizing this expertise, we will be able to improve the drug testing efficiency in more precise way, which will facilitate the challenging drug development and expensive drug testing for cancer therapeutics.

On this project, what are you doing that would be impossible without microfluidics?

The pharmaceutical industry typically depends upon the traditional tissue culture flask and animal model to investigate the breast cancer etiology and development of new drug. These models are inexpensive and showing high degree of reproducibility but they may not be able to mimic the actual tissue heterogeneity of breast tumor microenvironment.

Microfluidics systems emerged as an alternative in vitro technology to investigate the mechanism behind cancer progression and metastasis. It can also be used to predict the drug efficacy under controlled fluidic flow condition. With the microfluidic chip, 3D tumor microenvironment is created by using collagen hydrogel to mimic the in vivo environment in which the cancer cell is surrounded by neighboring fibroblasts and endothelial cells.

This microchip has concentration gradient generation and a perfusable platform of co-culture to study the tumor-stromal interactions which allows better examination of important characteristic of cancer progression such as biochemical and biophysical properties, tumor invasion and may provide a possible therapeutic approach in a controlled microenvironment.

How does this project push back the current state of the art?

To get over the problems associated with in vitro 2D culture and animal model, the tissue engineering and pharmaceutical fields focus on more advanced technology like microfluidics.

Microfluidic systems enable enhanced dynamic control over the cellular microenvironment within on-chip tissue models, such as providing nutrients, growth factors and mechanical and biochemical cues to the surrounding cells and regulate cellular behavior. It has great potential for the investigation of basic mechanisms of organ physiology and disease. They are particularly well suited to the study of biological phenomena that depend on tissue microarchitecture and perfusion. This microfluidic device creates a uniquely accurate method for replicating the actual tumor microenvironment and will be utilized to understand the drug response to the human body.