Dr Vicky Green
Utilising tissue-on-a-chip technology as an ex vivo model of breast cancer metastatic colonisation
Project Description
Breast cancer kills over 11,000 women each year in the UK. Virtually all of these women die because their breast cancer cells travel to other organs within the body such as the liver, lungs, bones and brain, where they grow into new tumours and stop the organs from working. Therefore, one way to stop women dying from breast cancer is to prevent breast cancer cells from growing in other organs. Currently, however, we do not understand how breast cancer cells move to and grow in other organs, so we are not able to prevent it with drugs.
Most studies trying to understand how breast cancer cells grow in different organs take place in mice. However this is not an ideal way to study the process, as it is very difficult to watch cancer cells growing inside a mouse. To get around this, large numbers of mice are used for each experiment with some being killed at different time points and the cancer cell spread to other organs then determined. This uses a lot of mice, and still does not allow us to see exactly what happens when cancer cells are growing in these organs. Replicating the growth of breast cancer cells in other organs in a laboratory dish would be a way to better understand this process, whilst also reducing the number of mice used in research. Previous work has attempted to do this, however the laboratory systems which have been created lack the complexity of cancer cell growth seen in patients, so uptake amongst researchers has been low.
| Status | Project Complete |
|---|---|
| Value | £8,771.00 |
| Project Dates | Jul 1, 2019 - Mar 31, 2021 |
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