I-Corps: Rapid 3D Extrusion of Synthetic Tumor Microenvironments

实体瘤包含各种复杂且动态变化的微环境，已知多种细胞类型之间的信号传导事件在肿瘤进展、侵袭和转移中起关键作用。为了加深对这种生物学的理解，需要在体外准确地模拟这些结构以用于基础研究和药物筛选。然而，目前的系统不能模拟体内细胞和基质的复杂组织。这项技术的愿景是开发和商业化更多的生物相关模型，用于旁分泌环路信号传导，特别是关于癌症转移。该I-Corps团队认为，所提出的技术可以用于高通量药物筛选平台，这些平台只需几秒钟即可制造组织支架，只需几天的孵育即可监测细胞偶联迁移效应。该团队还认为，这种快速和生物学相关的分析方法也可用于确定针对肿瘤相关巨噬细胞（TAM）的药物抑制的最佳药物浓度，以及其他细胞偶联迁移靶点。该技术目前处于原型阶段，I-Corps团队正在使用其他药物和浓度在乳腺癌/巨噬细胞系统中不断验证该技术。该团队还在探索这项技术是否可以作为迁移工具应用于其他细胞对系统。到目前为止，该团队还没有采取措施将该技术商业化。通过I-Corps计划，该团队计划与可能愿意使用拟议技术作为试运行服务的制药公司建立联系。该团队认为，这将最终成为其最低可行产品所需的技术演示。此外，他们计划在未来进一步探索其他商业化路线，例如集成测试试剂盒。

Solid tumors house an assortment of complex and dynamically changing microenvironments in which signaling events between multiple cell types are known to play a critical role in tumor progression, invasion, and metastasis. To deepen the understanding of this biology, it is desirable to accurately model these structures in vitro for basic studies and for drug screening. However, current systems fall short of mimicking the complex organization of cells and matrix in vivo. The vision for this technology is toward the development and commercialization of more biologically-relevant models for paracrine loop signaling, particularly with regards to cancer metastasis. This I-Corps team believes that the proposed technology can be utilized in high-throughput drug screening platforms that take seconds to manufacture tissue scaffolds and only a few days of incubation to monitor cell-coupled migration effects. The team also believes that this rapid and biologically-relevant analysis method can also be applied to determine optimal drug concentrations for pharmaceutical inhibition targeting Tumor Associated Macrophages (TAMs) for personalized medicine, in addition to other cell-coupled migration targets. The technology is currently in the prototyping stage, where this I-Corps team is continuously validating this technology in the breast adenocarcinoma/macrophage system with other drugs and concentrations. The team is also exploring if this technology can be applied to other cell pair systems as a migration tool. As of yet, the team has not taken steps toward commercializing the technology. Through the I-Corps program, the team plans to make contacts with pharmaceutical companies that might be willing to use the proposed technology as a service for a trial run. The team believes that this will ultimately be the technology demonstration required as its minimum viable product. In addition, they plan on further exploring other commercialization routes, such as integrated test kits, in the future.