Browsing by Author "King, Michael R."

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    Superhydrophobic Array Devices for the Enhanced Formation of 3D Cancer Models
    (American Chemical Society, 2024) Lopez-Cavestany, Maria; Wright, Olivia A.; Reckhorn, Noah T.; Carter, Alexandria T.; Jayawardana, Kalana; Nguyen, Tin; Briggs, Dayrl P.; Koktysh, Dmitry S.; Esteban Linares, Alberto; Li, Deyu; King, Michael R.; Bioengineering
    During the metastatic cascade, cancer cells travel through the bloodstream as circulating tumor cells (CTCs) to a secondary site. Clustered CTCs have greater shear stress and treatment resistance, yet their biology remains poorly understood. We therefore engineered a tunable superhydrophobic array device (SHArD). The SHArD-C was applied to culture a clinically relevant model of CTC clusters. Using our device, we cultured a model of cancer cell aggregates of various sizes with immortalized cancer cell lines. These exhibited higher E-cadherin expression and are significantly more capable of surviving high fluid shear stress-related forces compared to single cells and model clusters grown using the control method, helping to explain why clustering may provide a metastatic advantage. Additionally, the SHArD-S, when compared with the AggreWell 800 method, provides a more consistent spheroid-forming device culturing reproducible sizes of spheroids for multiple cancer cell lines. Overall, we designed, fabricated, and validated an easily tunable engineered device which grows physiologically relevant three-dimensional (3D) cancer models containing tens to thousands of cells.