A team of tissue engineers has found a way to unroll the mysteries of cancer by, literally, growing cancer cells in the form of a rolled-up sheet.

The new discovery, developed by researchers at the University of Toronto, offers a way to speed up the development of new drugs and therapies and ask new questions about how cancer cells behave. It mimics the 3D environment of a tumour, yet can also be taken apart in seconds, according to the team.

Studying cancer cells in a traditional petri dish is challenging, the researchers say, because cells in a tumour grow in three dimensions, while the dish is only two-dimensional. Cells in the centre of a tumour also have less access to oxygen and nutrients than those growing near the surface, close to the blood vessels.

These subtle, location-dependent differences have a big impact on cell behaviour but have proven difficult to replicate in a dish, the team explains.

Professor Alison McGuigan, a member of the university’s Engineering’s BioZone, attempted to address this issue with the prototype she built with her graduate student Darren Rodenhizer. They impregnated a short strip of a porous, paper-like support material with collagen, a gel-like material found in the body, and cancer cells.

The whole thing was then bathed in a nutrient-rich culture solution for a day, allowing the cells to adjust to their new environment. The strip was rolled around a metal core, forming an engineered tumour, which was then cultured for a few more days before performing analysis of tumour cell behaviour.

Upon unrolling the device, the team found noticeable differences between the inner and outer layers. “As the oxygen level goes down, the number of dead cells in the layer increases, so the cells are responding to that oxygen gradient,” says Rodenhizer.

Those cells that were still alive were shown to behave differently than the surface cells, according to the team. For example, they more strongly expressed genes associated with low oxygen conditions. Crucially, the changes were gradual and continuous along the length of the strip.

The single-layer design is simple enough, making it easier for other lab researchers to adopt the process. Researchers can use their approach when looking at how to understand what makes cancerous cells in a tumour different from non-cancerous tissue, the researchers explain. Exploiting these differences could accelerate the search for drugs that target cancer while leaving healthy cells alone.

The technology also holds great promise for the field of personalised medicine, McGuigan says. “The idea would be to take a patient’s own cells and create copies of their tumour,” she added.

McGuigan hopes that their discovery will be widely adopted in the research community. “It’s very translatable and transferable to other labs. We definitely want others to use it, because the larger the community, the more applications we will discover,” she said.

In October 2014, a team at the Queensland University of Technology demonstrated how hydrogels provide a potential matrix for use in developing 3D models to study breast and prostate cancer cell growth. According to the researchers, their findings confirm the suitability of hydrogels with cancer cell lines to study the pathomechanisms of breast and prostate cancer.

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