David Beebe, PhD, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and Sheena Kerr, PhD, research assistant professor at UW Carbone, lead this “tumor-on-a-chip” modeling research and collaborate with other campus researchers to study several cancer types, including prostate, head and neck, breast, ovarian and kidney.
“I think what’s unique (about our technology) is that it’s biologically complex, but not necessarily technologically complex, which has really helped us rapidly adapt and reconfigure the system for different cancers,” according to Kerr.
Using tumor tissue samples from individual cancer patients, their lab leverages microfluidic technology to grow a living model of a tumor and its environment called a microphysiological system. These models provide a real-time view of how cancer cells interact with one another, and how tumors exploit healthy surrounding cells and molecules for growth and evading treatments.
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“With this, we can carry out a lot of different functional assays, see how those cells respond to treatments, how the cells respond to and talk to each other, we can perturb it in a number of different ways,” Kerr said.
The goal is to provide a better translational model for cancer treatment research than using animals. Despite being a key part of medical research for decades, animal models have biological limitations that contribute to a high failure rate in translating lab findings to clinical testing. Microphysiological systems also have medical research uses beyond cancer.
Notable UW Carbone collaborators for their lab include Drs. Joshua Lang, Dan Shapiro, Paul Harari, Adam Burr, Jason Abel, and Jenny Gumperz, PhD. Beebe and Kerr are also involved in UW’s Head and Neck Cancer Specialized Program of Research Excellence, including a small clinical pilot study where they’ve built models from study patients’ tissue samples to test how accurately those models reflect real-time treatments these patients receive.
“We have the first cohort of patients where we’ve built models for them, treated them, and so far, it looks like we are modeling the patient outcomes (with the devices), but again, it’s very preliminary,” Beebe said.
Because microphysiological systems are still relatively new, more validation and investment is needed to prove they are reliable and accurate research models. While they are relatively costly and labor-intensive to produce, these devices are providing fundamentally new insights that could lead to improved therapies and treatment decision-making.
Beebe notes there is a strong funding push by the National Institutes of Health to advance new methods of modeling human biology that don’t involve animals, which will help encourage new research projects and ultimately more data to prove its reliability.
“We do have a lot of data that suggests the biology of what we’re seeing in these models is more accurate, but the ultimate test is patient outcomes, and particularly in cancer, that (data) can often take a long time to accumulate,” he said.
Microphysiological system research at UW has been expanding. Jose Ayuso Dominguez, PhD, assistant professor of dermatology, and María Virumbrales-Muñoz, PhD, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, both trained in Beebe’s lab and now lead their own cancer-related research. Duc-Huy Nguyen, PhD, a UW Carbone researcher and assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is using these devices to study liver biology.
