Toronto team's organ chip shows why cancer rarely reaches the heart

The University of Toronto said its researchers have built a multi-organ-on-a-chip device to investigate why the heart is one of the least common sites of cancer metastasis, the spread of cancer to other organs. Metastasis causes more than 90% of cancer-related deaths.

The team’s device, the Multi-organ Invasion Device (MInD), connects several engineered tissues in one system under dynamic fluid flow. It belongs to organ-on-a-chip research, which recreates human physiology in the lab for drug testing and disease modeling.

In the team’s tests, aggressive breast cancer cells readily invaded engineered liver tissue but invaded cardiac tissue significantly less. Protein and gene-expression analysis then showed that cardiac tissue altered pathways tied to metastasis, immune responses and cell migration, suppressing metastasis to the heart.

The team also developed a new way to make PermeoTubes from a biodegradable elastic polymer using granular 3D printing, and believes the approach may apply more broadly in organ-on-a-chip research.

Sources: University of Toronto