Exploring physical determinants of premetastatic niche with organotypic metastasis-on-a-chip

This research is to develop a novel organotypic metastases-on-a-chip to understand how biophysical factors contribute to the formation of a premetastatic niche. A premetastatic niche refers to the unique microenvironment in destiny organs that receives metastatic cancer cells. Understanding its physical determinants may add to facilitate discovery of potential microenvironment modifiers as new anti-metastasis strategy. we have manufactured and characterized an alginate hydrogel tube (AHT), a manufacturing process based on divalent ion curing will give rise to AHTs with combination of physical properties including submicron surface topography, stiffness, and molecular sieve pore size. The process parameters will be optimized to obtain biomimetic physical properties of the bone marrow microenvironment. Based on studies on tumor microenvironment and our preliminary results.