Engineering viscoelastic hydrogels for mimicking the tumour microenvironment and stopping tumour progression

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The tumour stroma is a complex microenvironment in which components are recruited or remodelled to facilitate invasive tumour growth and spread of tumour cells to distant tissues. Therefore, specific focus is placed on understanding how the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM), mainly collagen and fibronectin, is altered to mediate tumour progression. Hydrogels are water-swollen cell-friendly biomaterials, whose mechanical, structural, and biochemical properties can be tuned to mimic native ECMs, for application in tissue engineering or as in vitro models. However, standard hydrogels used in cell culture focus on their elastic mechanical properties and neglect to consider their viscous, dynamic nature. Hence, researchers are developing viscoelastic hydrogels with controlled viscous properties to control cell mechano-sensing, lineage commitment of stem cells, or proliferation / invasion of cancer cells. In this project, the student will fabricate and characterise viscoelastic hydrogels with varied viscoelastic properties with the aim of (i) mimicking the viscoelastic properties of the breast tumour microenvironment and (ii) understanding how cancer cells (3 types of cancer cells will be investigated, from non-aggressive to highly aggressive types) and control cells sense microenvironmental changes and respond to these properties. These studies will be performed both in 2D and more physiological 3D environments. The project is expected to provide novel insights into how the in vitro microenvironment can be engineered to alter cell fate and stop tumour progression, invasion, and metastasis.