New Drug Testing Approach for Pancreatic Cancer via the ‘Time Machine’ Discovered
Previous studies have shown, many patients with pancreatic cancer have only a roughly 10-percent chance of survival within five years of diagnosis as they tend to become resistant to chemotherapy.
A 'time machine' that engineers from Purdue University designed to detect pancreatic cancer behavior over time propose a new approach for drug testing that could help researchers better detect resistance.
As a result, scientists found that "testing potential drugs on multiple tumor cell subtypes," instead of just a single subtype, can expose drug resistance that may occur because of the manner different subtypes of cancers are interacting with each other. The Royal Society of Chemistry Journal Lab on a Chip recently published the said research.
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Microfluidic devices are beginning to become more conventional in the development process of drugs as they enable scientists to test drugs in lifelike simulations of a biological system through the use of actual tissue samples although on a quicker time scale compared to animal models.
Observing How Cancer Cells Interact
According to Purdue mechanical engineering professor Bumsoo Han, "The drug discovery and screening process" has been utilizing a single cancer cell subtype and examining how it interacts with nearby non-cancer cells. However, "this may overestimate" the effectiveness of the drug.
Han, who is also a program leader of the Purdue Center for Cancer Research, also said, by shortening the time to observe how cancer cells "interact within a pancreatic tumor," they found that a single cancer cell subtype cannot just be more drug-resistant compared to others. However, drug-sensitive cells can become resistant as well, through interaction between the subtypes.
Reports on this new technology describe the 'time machine' as a tool used in the laboratory, also known as a microfluidic device.
Scientists describe these tools as gum strip-sized chips or slides, where cancer cells are usually cultured in channels "smaller than a millimeter in diameter."
The 'Time Machine' or Microfluidic Devices
On the 'time machine' or microfluidic device, the cells can already grow in a natural or realistic environment, such as in a collagen tube that was created by Han's lab to simulate the pancreatic duct.
Microfluidic devices are beginning to become more conventional in the development process of drugs. They enable scientists to test drugs in lifelike simulations of a biological system through the use of actual tissue samples, although on a quicker time scale compared to animal models.
Han's research team found that around 25 percent of research publications in 2019, indexed by PubMed, a database for biomedical literature, had utilized microfluidic devices as models to examine tumors from patients or animals.
However, most of these microfluidic devices only show the late-stage growth of the tumor. With the device of Han and his team, as indicated in their study, "Scientists can load in cell lines" from a patient or an animal model prior to the occurrence of gene mutation, allowing them to see all stages of growth or progression of the tumor.
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The Device's Role in Cancer Cells
While research findings made using the 'time machine" need to be verified in humans before they get placed into clinical practice, such devices can shorten the drug development process by providing new research approaches.
The findings from the device Han developed to emphasize the need for investigating interactions between cancer cells.
Specifically, the engineering professor said, "Not much research has been done" on what type of interaction takes place within tumors; thus, those drug resistance mechanisms "have been overlooked."
Furthermore, these results are already informing the new drug compounds' development. Purdue Institute for Drug Discovery director Zhong-Yin Zhang is using Han's 'time machine' to test a compound targeted at blocking an oncogenic process previously identified by Zhang's lab as playing a role in the development of cancer.
The microfluidic device enables Zhang's team to examine the compound not just for pancreatic cancer in particular, but on multiple cancer cell subtypes, as well.
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Oct 30, 2020 12:00 PM EDT
