University of Kentucky Center for Cancer and Metabolism (Pilot Project - Dr. Christine Trinkle)

This work will develop an innovative, high-throughput ex vivo platform for assaying patient-specific response to potential cancer therapies. This platform leverages microfluidic technology, 3D culture methods and patient- derived tumor organoids to create a device that can integrate multiple microenvironmental cues to mimic the dynamic in vivo state of tumors. By combining these methods, it is possible to recreate realistic dose dynamics of drugs to individual tumor organoids, and control other local parameters such as oxygen tension that are unique to tumor microenvironments. This model will offer substantial improvements over conventional tissue culture approaches and will bridge the gap between traditional 2D culture assays and animal models. In this work we will: 1) characterize behavior of established tumor cell lines subjected to controlled hypoxic microenvironment in a high-throughput platform, and 2) determine whether drug response of breast cancer cell lines and primary tumor organoids in the microfluidic platform correlate with in vivo response.