In a move that could aid drug development to fight cancer, a team from the city’s Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) is trying to mimic the growth of cancer tissues in the lab by engineering cancer tissue. What they are trying to achieve is a “realistic 3D model tissue,” which is likely to help screen the right drug, if not lead to a new one.
The IISc. team’s endeavour is a deviation from traditional methods of studying cancer, which is usually done by observing layers of cells grown on a petri dish. Instead, they are growing them on scaffoldings (made out of synthetic material) that allows them to observe how different cells interact with each other and the effect of drugs, which, in the case of cancer treatment, is not felt equally by all cells.
The experiment is being conducted by a group in the Department of Materials and Engineering, led by Assistant Professor Kaushik Chatterjee, in collaboration with Associate Professor Annapoorni Rangarajan’s team in the Biological Sciences Department, IISc.
The team has sourced tissues from two to three hospitals in Bengaluru and is at present focussing on breast cancer, Prof. Chatterjee told The Hindu . “There are patients with advanced stages of cancer whose breasts have been removed. We are taking the tumour that is removed and thrown away. In a tissue, cells are organised in some sort of three-dimensional architecture. That is what we want to create,” he explained.
Results
The team first grew the tissues separately in petri dishes and scaffolds, took them out and injected them into a healthy mice.
It was observed that cells grown on scaffolds have a faster growth rate when compared to those derived from a petri dish. They also spread to other organs throughout the body more quickly.
“They are bigger and more aggressive tumour and start penetrating other tissues. So from the breast, it affects blood and then the lungs,” he said.
About the results that such an experiment could yield, Prof. Chatterjee said a lot of money and effort is wasted if a drug tested in a petri dish or on an animal does not yield results on a human.
“This is a more realistic model. Since you are testing the drug on a human cell, it is more predictive in what happens in a human trial,” he added.
What next?
Though different groups in the world are conducting similar experiments, meeting different levels of success, the IISc team pegs theirs as being a more “comprehensive model,” showing a complex phenomenon.
Gowri Balachander, PhD research scholar in the Centre for Biosystems Science and Engineering, who works in both labs, said the group plans to work with a mix of various cells —like fibroblasts— which secrete protein, or endothelial cells, which line blood vessels, in the future to gauge how cancer cells interact with each other and with other entities surrounding them.
