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 era of three-dimensional nanoscale tumor fashions.

The superhydrophobic array gadget (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 means of the bloodstream from a major tumor website to different elements of the physique.

“The examine of metastasis ⎯ the main reason for most cancers deaths ⎯ poses a selected problem partially as a result of problem of creating correct, high-throughput fashions,” stated King, who’s corresponding writer on a examine printed in ACS Nano that describes the brand new culturing platform. “We hope this device will unlock new information about this problematic stage of the illness and assist us determine 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 know the properties of major tumors in addition to what causes most cancers to unfold. Also known as “liquid biopsy,” this sampling strategy 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,” stated Alexandria Carter, a researcher within the King lab who’s a co-author on the examine. “Most cancers cells touring alone usually tend to succumb to shear stress destruction or immune cell assaults. Nonetheless, 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 examine is particularly difficult. For this reason SHArD is an thrilling new device for understanding major 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,” stated King, a Most cancers Prevention and Analysis Institute of Texas Scholar who not too long ago 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 utility in thoughts, however we have been curious and hopeful that the brand new materials would have particular properties that may be helpful for most cancers biology.”

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

As soon as they have 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 concern 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 stated. “Any lab with clear room entry can observe our protocols and create variations of this platform that meet the precise wants of their particular analysis tasks.”

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

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