Using engineered
tissue environments in various shapes and patterns, the study of skin cancer found that the more curved the cell cultures were, the more cancer cells at the edges displayed markers of stem cell characteristics — the key to spreading to other tissues.
Knowing TH17 cells need to function in a variety
of tissue environments throughout the body, Sundrud's team wondered if and how these cells might use different tools to behave normally in one environment — or tissue — than they'd use in another.
Kilian hopes that the patterned,
engineered tissue environments will give researchers a new way to find and culture cancer stem cells, which have been very elusive in conventional cultures — less than 1 percent of cells, he said.
«These findings demonstrate that efficient actin filament disassembly by GMF is essential for rapid dynamics of cell protrusions, and that this dynamics are important for cell migration in a three -
dimensional tissue environment,» says Minna Poukkula from the research group of professor Pekka Lappalainen.
Tumors are notoriously difficult to study in their natural habitat — body tissues — but a new
synthetic tissue environment may give cancer researchers the next - best look at tumor growth and behavior.
In their study, scientists around Prof. Olivier Pertz from the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Basel gained novel insights into the regulation of directional cell migration: Using a special procedure, 20 micrometer wide lines were fabricated on glass thereby mimicking the
connective tissue environment — creating a highway for cells.
Senescent cells have removed themselves from the cycle of replication in reaction to cell and tissue damage, or a
local tissue environment that seems likely to result in cancer.
Herlyn studies the normal and
malignant tissue environment to develop rational approaches to cancer therapy, with a focus on melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer.
Therefore, getting better insights into the structure and function / dysfunction of the mitotic spindle apparatus in an
intact tissue environment is of utmost importance.
In this new study, the research team examined how tumor cells moved through a more accurate model of
the tissue environment that included cell - sized tracks compared with a uniform environment with no paths.
In addition, the 3D printing technology allows for scalability, which will be helpful going forward as they move to test their designs in larger, more complex organisms and
tissue environments.
The point of this paper is we should not overlook the huge influence of the tissue architecture,
the tissue environment, the tissue composition.
That suggested critical importance of
the tissue environment, what Zhang calls the «seed and soil» model: Tumors that grow in one kind of tissue won't grow in another easily.
Affected cells signal to surrounding unaffected cells and likely alter
the tissue environment.
A key issue we address is
the tissue environment in which muscle stem cells are activated.
To generate almost pure populations of human podocytes in cell culture, Samira Musah, the study's first author and HMS Dean's Postdoctoral Fellow who is working with Ingber at the Wyss Institute, leveraged pieces of the stem cell biologists» arsenal, and merged them with snippets taken from Ingber's past research on how cells in the body respond to adhesive factors and physical forces in
their tissue environments.