toward Moving cancer cures

Researchers hone in on how tumors grow to create personalized medicine

Mehdi Nikkhah, an associate professor of biomedical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, has been working toward personalized cancer cures for several years.

He and his ASU collaborators bioengineered a way to study tumors’ microenvironment and discovered a new role that cells play in spreading cancer. They hope to one day develop personalized treatments for patients.

Isolating the cancer tumor environment

Originally led by then ASU biomedical engineering doctoral student Danh Truong, ’18 PhD, and continued by Kalpana Ravi, a doctoral student in the Nikkhah Lab, the innovation replicates disease states or organs in an easily controlled environment — the chip. These microfluidic environments — rectangular pieces of plastic about the size of a long fingernail with channels for depositing live cells — are called “organs-on-a-chip.”

Using the chip technology, researchers can watch a single cancer cell move through the microenvironment, a phenomenon that is impossible to observe in a person’s body. They discovered that the gene expression of cancer cells can change when interacting with fibroblast cells — which usually aid in healing — to instead help spread cancer cells quickly.

The team worked with Mayo Clinic surgical oncologist Barbara Pockaj to better understand stromal and immune cells’ role in breast cancer metastasis and with Shwetal Mehta at Ivy Brain Tumor Center at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix to explore how tumor cells spread in brain cancer.

Tumor-on-chip next to a penny. Tumor cells form the central region (blue). The red region is injected with other cells to test treatments.

A major step forward

As scientists are able to replicate a person’s specific tumor and its surrounding microenvironment — including immune cells and other proteins and tissues — on a chip, they can test how cancer cells respond to various drugs, avoiding unnecessary treatments on patients. And because the chips are inexpensive, researchers can run hundreds of tests at low costs.

“It’s not very far off that we can create fully patient-derived tumor and tissue cells and provide fully personalized medicine for cancer therapy,” says Nikkhah, an associate faculty member in the Biodesign Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics and an associate professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, one of the eight Fulton Schools. “If you design the therapeutics to knock down targeted genes or block specific pathways inside a patient’s tumor cells, you may be able to stop the spread of the tumor.” ��