Bioengineers develop lotus leaf-inspired system for cancer research

The lotus leaf is a pioneer of self-cleaning, water-repellant engineering. Water droplets all however hover on its floor, whose distinctive texture traps air in its nanosized ridges and folds.

Rice College bioengineers report harnessing the lotus impact to develop a system for culturing most cancers cell clusters that may make clear hard-to-study tumor properties. The brand new zinc oxide-based culturing floor mimics the lotus leaf floor construction, offering a extremely tunable platform for the high-throughput technology of three-dimensional nanoscale tumor fashions.

The superhydrophobic array system (SHArD) designed by Rice bioengineer Michael King and collaborators can be utilized to create tunable, compact, physiologically related fashions for learning the development of most cancers, together with metastasis ⎯ the stage within the illness when cancerous cells journey by way of the bloodstream from a main tumor website to different elements of the physique.

“The research of metastasis ⎯ the main reason for most cancers deaths ⎯ poses a specific problem partly because of the problem of creating correct, high-throughput fashions,” mentioned King, who’s corresponding writer on a research revealed in ACS Nano that describes the brand new culturing platform. “We hope this instrument will unlock new data about this problematic stage of the illness and assist us establish methods to intervene with a purpose to cease or stop it from taking place.”

Scientists and clinicians now depend on blood samples containing circulating tumor cells ⎯ a key marker of metastasis ⎯ to grasp the properties of main tumors in addition to what causes most cancers to unfold. Also known as “liquid biopsy,” this sampling method sometimes doesn’t yield sufficient of a “catch” to allow in-depth, large-scale research of metastatic processes.

“‘Security in numbers’ sadly additionally applies to most cancers cells circulating within the bloodstream,” mentioned Alexandria Carter, a researcher within the King lab who’s a co-author on the research. “Most cancers cells touring alone usually tend to succumb to shear stress destruction or immune cell assaults. Nevertheless, once they journey in teams, the probability that they efficiently attain and settle in different elements of the physique will increase.

“These few lone most cancers cells in a single blood draw are already uncommon, so isolating sufficient clusters for an in depth research is very difficult. This is the reason SHArD is an thrilling new instrument for understanding main and metastatic most cancers.”

The King lab had beforehand succeeded in creating nanorod layers of halloysite, a naturally occurring substance whose texture promotes the adhesion of circulating tumor cells whereas concurrently repelling blood cells.

“When Kalana Jayawardana joined our lab as a brand new postdoctoral fellow in 2018, he began to experiment with rising zinc oxide nanorod surfaces,” mentioned King, a Most cancers Prevention and Analysis Institute of Texas Scholar who lately joined Rice because the E.D. Butcher Chair of Bioengineering and particular adviser to the provost on life science collaborations with the Texas Medical Heart. “At first, we did not have a particular software in thoughts, however we had been curious and hopeful that the brand new materials would have particular properties that will be helpful for most cancers biology.”

The mission was later taken over by a doctoral pupil within the King lab, Maria Lopez-Cavestany, and took off in an thrilling course. Cavestany, now a Ph.D. graduate, is the primary writer on the research.

As soon as they had been in a position to develop a steady “carpet” of zinc oxide nanotubes, the researchers added a teflonlike coating on prime, in essence recreating the lotus leaf construction ⎯ nanoscale roughness mixed with a hydrophobic layer that collectively gave rise to true superhydrophobicity, a phrase stemming from the Greek for “excessive worry of water.” To create SHArD, the researchers added a microwell grid with completely sized compartments, then examined the system to evaluate its efficiency.

“SHArD is prepared for use in biomedical analysis,” Carter mentioned. “Any lab with clear room entry can comply with our protocols and create variations of this platform that meet the precise wants of their particular analysis initiatives.”

Initially supposed as a method to reliably tradition main tumor fashions at the next throughput, SHArD is very tunable and may simply be tailored to tradition metastatic clusters as properly. The truth that SHArD was efficiently used to develop spheroidal fashions of main tumors already expands the most cancers modeling toolkit, making it attainable to create superhydrophobic culturing gadgets within the absence of extremely specialised tools.

“The cluster-forming system has opened the door to new areas of analysis into the damaging clusters discovered within the bloodstream of late-stage most cancers sufferers,” King mentioned.