Seeds, soils, stem cells, and cancer

Metastasis is the leading cause of fatality for women diagnosed with breast cancer. The most common anatomical sites of distant tumor growth include the brain, lung, liver, and bone, and it is well known that this metastatic spread in breast cancer is not random. Given the physical and chemical diversity of these secondary tissue sites, my lab hypothesizes that there is a relationship between the biophysical and biochemical properties of the tissue, and the ability of breast cancer cells to adhere, migrate, grow, and respond to chemotherapeutics at these secondary sites. We have created biomaterial microenvironments, which capture the integrin-binding, stiffness, and stem-cell recruitment properties of the secondary site tissues. We propose that these types of biomaterial environments can be used to predict tissue-specific spread, and may serve as a system that pharmaceutical companies can use to rule out false positives and potentially save billions of dollars in the drug development pipeline.