Research Projects

The research aims to develop a smart scaffold for in vitro tumor culturing, enabling enhanced diffusion and real-time monitoring of essential tumor microenvironment parameters. Vasculature is a major limitation of lab-grown in vitro tumoroids, limiting nutrient transport and waste metabolite excretion. Vasculature also plays a crucial role as a communication channel between cells, which is absent in most reported in vitro tumor spheroid culture. Attempts to create vessels using endothelial cells have been difficult and time-consuming. Reproducibility is another challenge for such platforms, limiting their use in drug discovery, personalized medicine, and cancer biology research. The main objective of this project is to generate a tumor culture and monitoring platform that enables better modeling of tumor behavior, drug response, and personalized medicine. Hollow porous polycaprolactone (PCL) microfibers will be used as scaffolds to culture tumor cells, enabling effective media diffusion from bulk media towards the inner region of 3D tumor spheroids. Silica microsensors will be synthesized for real-time monitoring of the tumoroid microenvironment, selected for its superior biocompatibility and availability of chemical handles for linking sensor dye molecules. Using sensor embedded PCL fibers, a 3D scaffold will be formed for co-culture of cancer (Pancreatic) and supporting cells, enabling unhindered growth of tumor spheroids with real-time observation of the microenvironment. The effect of scaffold properties on gene expression profiles of tumoroids will be evaluated using quantitative PCR to compare 2D culture, solid fiber, and hollow fiber tumoroids.