Malignant tumors are hard to kill in many ways because they’re hard to study. In particular, testing new therapies that involve nanoparticles that seek out and kill neoplasms involves being able to understand how to penetrate the environment of the tumor. In laboratory settings animals are typically used because tumors don’t survive for long outside the body. Studying how drugs and other therapies affect malignancies within animals is a challenge because the tumors have to be biopsied every time you want to check on its status. A new device called tumor-microenvironment-on-chip (T-MOC) developed at Purdue University offers nanomedicine researchers a platform on which to test their techniques and analyze them at the cellular level.
Blood vessels have tiny pores around endothelial cells through which nanoparticles can pass, but the same pores within blood vessels in tumors tend to be larger. On the other hand, the pressure of the interstitial fluid within tumors is greater than in the surrounding tissue, essentially pushing away nanoparticles that are trying to get inside. The new Purdue device consists of microfluidic channels within which cancerous and endothelial cells reside while being fed interstitial fluid being pumped through. The environment replicates the pores and pressure differences seen around tumors. To assess their ability to penetrate a neoplasm, nanoparticles can be introduced into the device to see whether they get through the chip.
Study in Journal of Controlled Release: Simulation of complex transport of nanoparticles around a tumor using tumor-microenvironment-on-chip…
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