WITH ADDISON VONDERSAAR, BRAULIO ANDRES ORTEGA QUESADA, AND DR. ADAM MELVIN, DEPARTMENT OF CHEMICAL AND BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING
Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer, with 2.3 million cases in 2022 exclusively. Estrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer is the most common breast cancer subtype and responds to endocrine therapy; however, some patients develop resistance. Traditional two-dimensional single-cell type culture approaches do not recapitulate the complexity of the cancer tumor microenvironment (TME). Cell-to-cell and cell-to-matrix interactions between cancer and stromal cells in the TME, such as enhanced expression of protein collagen-I, are suspected to drive development in endocrine resistance. Such requires alternative approaches, such as microfluidic spheroid production. The goal of this study is to utilize a microfluidic approach to evaluate how collagen-I production is altered in the TME when MCF-7 cells, a breast cancer cell line, are 3D co-cultured with MRC-5 cells, a lung-derived fibroblast. Fibroblasts, a type of stromal cell responsible for producing ECM proteins like collagen-I, are believed to enhance the proliferation of malignant cells. In this study, it is hypothesized that there will be a statistically significant difference in the proliferation between fibroblasts and breast cancer cells compared to cancer alone. It is also suspected that this enhanced proliferative behavior will align with enhanced collagen-I expression, supporting fibroblasts role in ER+ Cancer. Analysis on the Link Between Collagen-I Production and Enhanced Proliferation on 3D Co-Cultured Spheroids in a Microfluidic Device
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