Going with the Flow: Effects of Diet on Breast Cancer Cell Behavior in a Microfluidic Platform

Abstract

Triple negative breast cancer is an aggressive subtype of breast cancer, and its cancer progression is influenced by various microenvironmental factors, including diet and fluid shear stress. While dietary conditions like high-fat diets have been shown to influence cell metabolism, research on their interaction with physical forces such as flow remains limited. This project aims to investigate how dietary conditions affect breast cancer morphology under varying flow conditions in a microfluidic platform. MDA-MB- 231 cells were cultured under baseline and high-fat conditions and were seeded into a microfluidic chip, which ran varying flow rates using a monitored syringe pump. Images of cells in the chip were captured under a microscope for cell morphology analysis. Cell characteristics, such as cell roundness and area, were analyzed to evaluate morphological changes between both varying flow rates and the two dietary conditions. In both conditions, increasing flow rate increased the cell roundness, with more significance in the higher flow rates with increased shear stress. The effect of flow rate was more pronounced in the high-fat condition, where significant increases in cell roundness was observed at lower flow rates compared to baseline. Cell area also showed a similar pattern, with high-fat condition having a significant change in median cell area at a high flow rate, which was not seen in the baseline condition. Both findings suggest that cells cultured under high-fat conditions are more likely to be sensitive to shear stress, inducing morphological changes related to adhesion, which in turn may impact migration and cancer progression. This highlights the importance of studying cancer in the context of both metabolic and mechanical factors.