Podcast: Organ-on-a-chip: Our Best Shot At Beating Cancer?

In this episode, we explore how organ-on-a-chip technology is advancing our understanding of cancer behavior. Discover how researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology are using microfluidic devices to model the metastatic process, providing new insights into how cancer cells migrate and invade other tissues.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. 

Episode Notes

(2:40) - Cancer-on-a-chip technology advances our understanding of how cancer operates

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our favorite place to get electronics parts for any project, whether it be a hobby at home or a prototype for work. Click HERE to learn more about the role of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the medical world!

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Transcript

Hey everyone. Today we're talking about groundbreaking research that brings us one step closer to outsmarting cancer at its most elusive stage, which is metastasis, which is when it's spreading inside the body. So, we’re talking about a team that built a tiny chip that simulates cancer spreading inside the body. Hopefully they're able to crack the code on understanding how and why cancer spreads, which will unlock a whole world of treatments for stopping cancer.

What's up friends, this is The Next Byte Podcast where one gentleman and one scholar explore the secret sauce behind cool tech and make it easy to understand.

Daniel: Hey everyone, like we said we’re talking about microchip technology integrated with biology to help us understand cancer better and understand how cancer operates. But before we talk about that, I want to mention something quickly from today’s sponsor, Mouser Electronics. They’re one of our favorite electronic suppliers in the world. Not only because they have awesome relationships with all the cool cutting edge technology firms. That's how they get the cool parts and they can deliver to them, deliver them to you really easily. They also leverage those relationships to understand what's going on at the cutting edge. And then they share that information with us in the form of awesome technical resources. So, we've included one of those today, which is talking about using FPGAs, which are field programmable gate arrays, basically, highly customizable and reprogrammable microchips that you can use for rapid prototyping and customization. They're talking about how FPGAs can be used in the medical realm. So basically, how we're able to use this massively reprogrammable nature to get high speed development in PET and MRI systems and helping improve medical innovation. They've got awesome information here on how FPGAs work and why it's important for the medical realm.

Farbod: Dude, I'm a big fan of FPGAs. Excited to see Mouser talking about them because I feel like most folks don't know and the application hits close to home, right? Medical applications, everyone has some sort of medical need every now and then. Super exciting to see this.

Daniel: Well, yeah, and if you're able to improve the rate of iteration and innovation anywhere. I would probably choose the medical realm first, right massively improve people's health. The way that we for understand and treat different diseases. Yeah, I mean, it's an awesome application for it, we’re including a link to that resource in the show notes. You should check it out because it's also kind of related to what we're talking about today. Cancer on a chip technology, but before we talk about cancer on a chip and what that means and why it's important I kind of want to just talk about the mechanism of cancer in general. So, cancer, these cells inside your body, but the way that cancer spreads is when these cells break off from the main tumor and then travel through the body. That allows these free-floating cells to spread throughout the body and then they'll implant their way in another piece of tissue and start to take over. And that little cell that breaks off from the main tumor, I almost view it like trees letting pollen out. Like they're spreading tiny versions of themselves and then our mold spores maybe are a better example, that spreads tiny versions of itself and they flow through the blood in your body and then they're able to embed themselves in tissue and then the cancer starts to grow and spread. That's called metastasis. That's the mechanism by which most cancer spreads inside the body. The issue is scientists don't actually fully understand the full mechanism of how cancer cells make that first move into the bloodstream or into the lymphatic system in the body. So, they're trying to understand what's this mechanism, why and how are tumors releasing these cells such that they spread throughout the body. Most of these cancer tests so far to try and understand this have used animals or simple lab setups that don't actually allow them to see exactly what's going on inside the body. So, enter cancer on a chip. It's a simulation of what happens inside the human body, but the chip lets scientists completely have full visibility to understand watch how cancer cells try to escape from the tumor and spread into the body. And they did two main models, one for breast cancer, which shows how cells move into blood vessels inside breast tissue. And then they also did one for lymphatic cancer, which shows how cells interact with the lymph vessels in the lymphatic system. So really, it's this small chip with small microfluidic channels on it that are meant to represent the way that fluid flows inside the body. They place cancer cells on this chip, there's a gel around it that acts like human tissue, and then they try and observe them and fill it with real human cells, real blood, and then watch how the liquid flows and understand, try and understand how in the world is cancer spreading like this. Maybe this will help us to unlock and understand how to stop cancer from spreading, which makes it a lot more treatable.

Farbod: Yeah. And I think it's worth noting. So, the organ on a chip technology was news to me but apparently not the realm of biomedical engineering. It's been around for like 15 years. But what the PhD student did here, Mohammad, that what's really super novel about it is leveraging that technology to understand the metastasis that you were talking about, both dynamically and statically. So apparently, as far as I understood it, static analysis has been around. That's been the norm, you know, cancer occurs, it spreads on a specific organ. What you were mentioning earlier, in terms of how it spreads through the lymphatic nodes and reaches other organs, that is now something that we can study with this new approach. On top of that, you mentioned it in passing, but obviously the way that we've been able to roughly successfully understand these phenomena is by animal testing, which is a... It's not ideal, but there's really no other alternative or there hasn't been until now. But for those that care about the ethics, side of things. This innovation really gives us the best of both worlds. We can be nice to our furry friends and still get the results that we need to make sure we understand our diseases and coming up with the right treatments for them.

Daniel: No, exactly right. The animal testing is kind of a lose-lose, a lose, lose, lose, right? It costs a lot. It's not super high fidelity and it's not that ethical. Right. Like, so using this cancer on a chip technology or organ on a chip technology allows us to simulate the way that the microfluidic channels work inside the body. Let's talk actually a little bit about how they manufactured it. They a femtosecond laser. A femtosecond is a really, really small fraction of a second. So, this means that they have high control over when the laser is pulsing and when it's not. So, they use very, very small, very, very high precision laser where they've got high control over the time to shape tiny round channels inside this chip, like real blood vessels. And they also used 3D sugar printing to make the molds for these, which is pretty cool. I'm unsure exactly why they use sugar. I’m guessing, I'm thinking maybe it's because the sugar's soluble in water and they can, they can dissolve the mold after. I'm not sure. And then the last part is they use really fine needles to make lymph channels in soft gel. And essentially, they've got this hard mold that's shaped largely like the scaffolding, let's say, for the way that the fluidics work inside the body, the flow of fluid inside the body, including the lymphatic system and the blood system. And then they put a gel around this that kind of acts like human tissue. They inject and grow real human cells in there to create real blood vessel linings from human cells. And then liquid flows through this channel to act like blood or to act like lint fluid. And they have high control over every single aspect of this. So, they are combining real human cells, real flowing fluids, a real accurate tissue-like structure. But they're also very, very powerful. So, the way that they can control every single part of this design, the cells, the flow, the shape, this allows them to conduct up to nine tests at once on this tiny little chip. And I just imagine the improvements from animal testing where now you've got super high fidelity. Now you've got super high control. Now it's ethical. Now it also doesn't have a lot of the same issues that you had before. You've got high control. You've got high ability to customize everything. can't like customize the size of an animal's blood vessel. Like this is more, and I would call it like a step change in terms of the fidelity of data that they're able to get from this. And hopefully this unlocks additional quick understanding on the way that cancer cells start to move and spread step by step. They can test different types of cancers, maybe even make it specific to a certain patient or specific.

Farbod: That's exactly what I was going to say.

Daniel: Yeah. Specific domain. Basically, use this as like a, not a digital twin.

Farbod: Bespoke modeling.

Daniel: Cause it's not digital, right? Use it as a physical twin to help simulate the way that cancer might spread in my body versus yours. Or my body versus yours versus someone else.

Farbod: When they started talking about human cells, that's exactly where my mind went. Right. So not only are we able to conduct these tests on the human species, which is obviously better, but now you have a patient that, let's say, is undergoing treatment. You can get a cell culture from them, grow it and see how different medicines could impact their little organ on a device or just better understand how the cancer cells could metastasize for them versus your baseline. That's the average person. So, it opens up so many interesting avenues. And I don't know, this feels like a very powerful platform to build off of.

Daniel: Yeah. And I think what's interesting here is, you know, as much as we care a lot about cancer treatment and a lot of research and development has been focused towards trying to understand these mechanisms and develop treatments. I was actually listening to a podcast recently where they were talking about the mechanism of drug discovery. And they said that there's two important parts, right? The first part is understanding the biology, right? You need to understand the underlying biology or on why the body works in a certain way. That's what unlocks the second half, which is okay, which compounds do we know or what treatments do we know that can alter the way that the body's working and change it in our favor. But like until you crack open the first part of that equation, which is understanding how exactly a certain mechanism works inside the body, you're not really able to effectively treat it. So, this is hopefully going to be a huge unlock for us in the drug discovery, drug development realm towards treating cancer. Because the way that cancer kills people is not just by the tumor growing wherever it grows. It's by metastasizing and spread throughout the rest of the body. And the extent to which cancer has spread or metastasized, that's usually what dictates the stages of someone's in cancer, like stage one through four is how far the cancer spread or to what extent it's spread. So, even if we're not able to effectively kill cancer, if we're able to just keep it from spreading, this will have a massive impact on saving lives and on treating this awful disease that impacts so many people. So, it hits home for me on this, I care a lot about this and I'm really excited about it, especially now connecting that with this knowledge from the TBPN podcast I was listening to about how to develop drug treatments is you can't develop the drug until you do the research first to understand how the body works. And this is what they're unlocking here.

Farbod: Totally agree with you, man. Again, to me, this sounds like a very powerful platform for both the folks in academia and in industry to start leveraging when it comes to, I don't know, the exploratory side for drug development, for better understanding the treatment plans for patients. Again, you say this a lot. I hope this doesn't end up being one of those things that just gets locked up in a lab. I hope it makes; it's way out into the wild. So, I'm going to keep my eye out for this. I know you will too. Hopefully we can do an update, let's say in the next year or so on where this project is at.

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. I'm with you, man. You okay if I wrap up here?

Farbod: I was about to say, let's do it.

Daniel: Awesome. So, just zooming out a little bit, cancer spreads inside the body when cells break off from the main tumor and then they travel through the bloodstream or through the lymphatic system. But scientists don't actually fully understand how cancer cells are making that move into the bloodstream, why they're spreading, why cancer is spreading in the way that it does. Most of the ways that we do testing right now don't actually show what's going on in the body or they're unethical. So now we're talking about a team that created a tiny device called Cancer on a Chip. It's basically a super customizable small part that simulates what goes on inside the human body, helps scientists watch how cancer cells try to escape from a tumor and spread.  They've got two models right now, one for breast cancer, one for lymphatic cancer. And we're hopeful that this unlocks understanding on how and why cancer spreads inside the body, which then allows people to develop drugs to effectively treat it in the future.

Farbod: Love it. They killed it.

Daniel: Thanks, dawg.

Farbod: All right, folks, that's the pod.

Daniel: See you.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.