Vascularized Tumor Chips

Almost every tissue in the human body, including tissues of malignant origin, depends on the supply of oxygen and nutrients through blood vessels for its survival. Angiogenesis is essential in physiological processes, such as tissue homeostasis, wound healing, pregnancy and fetal development. The tumor-related vasculature represents an important part of the tumor niche and an attractive therapeutic target. Mainly due to the heterogeneity and complexity of the tumor microenvironment, efficient drug delivery to cancer is still a challenge. Therefore, a physiological model that simulates drug (or gene) delivery will help transform in vitro results into in vivo studies.

Alfa Chemistry's experienced team of scientists can provide you with the best strategies and plans for vascularized tumor chip research. We can design the microvascular tissue constructs on-chip in which vascular and perivascular cells self-organize de novo into a living and perfused vascular network in response to fluid flow and shear stress.

Please contact us for more information.

Our Research Methods

• Tumor Modeling: We have adjusted the basic vascularized micro-organ (VMO) platform for cancer research by integrating tumor cells into the model to generate vascularized micro-tumors or VMT.
• Anti-cancer Drug Screening: We test the response of VMT to FDA-approved chemotherapeutic drugs and small molecule receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) inhibitors that represent anti-cancer drugs and anti-angiogenesis drugs, including care specified for specific tumor types standard treatment.

Fig.1 Vascularized micro-tumor (VMT) model (a) a schematic of the microfluidic platform with a single unit. Three tissue chambers (1 mm × 1 mm × 0.1 mm) constitute 1 unit. Different levels of the medium in the four vials drive flow. (b) A schematic of the microfluidic platform with 12 units per plate. (Hachey S. J, et al. 2018)

Breakthrough in Our Vascularized Tumor Chips

• It can better simulate the structure, function and disease process of vascularized tumor mass in the body;
• Drugs with anti-angiogenesis and anti-metastasis capabilities can be directly evaluated in this system.
• It models the key steps of metastasis, which involves the interaction between tumor-endothelial and stromal cells, which is poorly understood and difficult to study in current preclinical models;
• The physiologically selective barrier to nutrition and drug delivery in the target tissue is more accurately established, so that more realistic drug screening can be carried out.

Reference

• Hachey S. J, et al. (2018). "Applications of Tumor Chip Technology." Lab Chip. 18: 2893-2912.

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