The Development of a Heterogeneous Micro-fluidic Chip for the Modeling of Cancer Tumors

Abstract

Despite a well-funded effort to cure cancer, the process for testing new treatments is crude. Typically, cancer treatments are first tested on cell cultures in Petri dishes, then through clinical trials in mice, and finally through clinical trials in humans. Scientists use in vitro tests in Petri dishes to explore how cancer cells interact with new treatments; however, Petri dishes poorly model the heterogeneity of the cancer tumor environment, often leading to results that don’t translate well to clinical studies. In this thesis, we assist in the ongoing development of a “Death Galaxy” chip, in which cancer cells are placed in a lattice of hexagonal chambers, each chamber its own micro-environment, in order to better model the heterogeneous tumor environment. Since recent research has shown that cancer prognosis is strongly correlated with the ability of T lymphocytes to invade a tumor, this thesis tailors the design of the Death Galaxy to experiments that examine how cancer cells interact with T lymphocytes. This thesis deals with two parts of the Death Galaxy’s development process. First, we adapt existing Death Galaxy designs for the eventual study of the interactions between PC3 cells and T lymphocytes. Second, we develop techniques to measure the velocity distributions and clustering strengths of PC3 cells in the Death Galaxy environment.