Environmental Impact

Serpooshan and his team are focused on the neuroblastoma tumor microenvironment and its influence on tumor behavior and the tumor's response to therapy. These interactions play significant roles in cancer progression, metastasis, and response to therapies.

“In recent years, this has become an area of great research interest, but there is a lack of reliable and biomimetic experimental models,” said Serpooshan, whose team’s recent study in the journal Advanced Science details their work in developing an in vitro model of neuroblastoma using a relatively new technology called 3D bioprinting.

Instead of utilizing metals and plastics to create a device or model, as in traditional 3D printing, the bioprinting technique uses materials like cells and hydrogels to create functional 3D tissues. These materials, called bioink, mimic the composition of human tissues.

Serpooshan’s lab has been a pioneer in using bioprinting in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications, which is the group’s primary focus. For this project, the researchers applied a hydrogel called gelMA as the bioink.

Then human-derived neuroblastoma spheroids (3D cell cultures that mimic tissues and microtumors) and human vascular endothelial cells (the cells lining blood vessels) were incorporated into the bioprinted gelMA to create a working model of the neuroblastoma tumor microenvironment.
 

Successful Test Run

The researchers manufactured their model and studied the processes of cancer under static and dynamic conditions — static, when nothing is really moving through the system, is the approach most often used in drug screening with in vitro applications, “which is a big limitation,” Serpooshan said. 

To track the tumor under more realistic, or dynamic, conditions, researchers used a bioreactor to simulate blood flow through the vasculature. Their analysis of the tumor environment under these conditions offered the most effective representation of what goes on between tumor cells and the vasculature, demonstrating in three dimensions how aggressively a tumor can grow, and how it may or may not respond to drugs.

“This is just a first step, but we’re very excited for having developed such a robust platform that can be adapted for a lot of future research applications,” Serpooshan said.

They’re starting with neuroblastoma, because Goldsmith’s lab has access to neuroblastoma cells from a variety of different patients and sources that now can be studied in a new way. 

“Some of these patients already have shown resistance to chemo-immunotherapy,” Serpooshan said. “So we can take advantage of this clinical data and create different models, drill down to the basic cellular and molecular mechanisms at play, and potentially come up with scenarios and strategies to help those patients who are resisting the drugs. Now we can move forward and ask more meaningful and clinically relevant questions.”