Unlocking Insights into Tumors’ Defenses

By Patrick L. Kennedy, College of Engineering

A BU team has become the first to measure an important hallmark of cancer in vivo, a step toward better monitoring of tumor progression and treatment response. Biomedical Engineering PhD candidate Sue Zhang with Hariri Institute Faculty Affiliate Hadi Nia (BME, MSE) and Mark Grinstaff (BME, Chemistry, MSE, CAMED), Darren Roblyer (BME, ECE) and colleagues reported on their findings in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

One of the characteristics of cancer cells that help them spread is a property that researchers call “solid stress,” which refers to the compressive and tensile forces inside tumors. Solid stress makes cancer cells stronger invaders and evaders both: it increases the cells’ ability to metastasize, and it helps them resist anti-cancer therapeutics.

A goal for many cancer researchers is to target solid stress in conjunction with standard cancer treatments. However, it’s been difficult to measure solid stress due to requirements for “resecting” the tumor—taking a sample of it.

“When you resect, it’s a snapshot,” says Nia, who co-advised Zhang, the paper’s lead author. “You don’t see the dynamics at work.”

The BU team has overcome this limitation by developing a noninvasive method of continuously monitoring the solid stresses within tumors. The researchers allow, for the first time, the ability to measure the solid stresses in vivo in animal models. “This is a huge step forward,” says Nia says. “We can see how factors like breathing affect the tumor; we can see how a treatment will affect it.”

Read the full story by Patrick L. Kennedy here.