Polymer Scaffolds May Lead to More Effective Cancer Therapies

A polymer structure, much like scaffolds used to support or repair buildings, could trigger more breakthroughs in cancer research.

Medical researchers have developed three-dimensional scaffolds made from porous polymers to mimic the environment in which cancer tumors grow in a human body. Cancer cells can then be grown in that structure — outside the body — so that researchers may then improve their treatment therapies.

“The scaffolds better recapitulate the microenvironment in which tumors grow, as compared with two-dimensional plastic surfacestypically used in cancer research to test anti-cancer drugs,” says Antonios Mikos, a bioengineer at Rice University who led the research team with Joseph Ludwig, an assistant professor and sarcoma medical oncologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was quoted in a news release from Rice University.

“We’ve been working to investigate how we can leverage our expertise in engineering normal tissues to cancerous tissues, which can potentially serve as a better predictor of anti-cancer drug response than standard drug-testing platforms,” Mikos says. The team’s research was summarized in a paper that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The result of the effort “provides a path forward to better evaluate promising biologically targeted therapies in the preclinical setting,” says Ludwig. The news release explains further the advantages of the polymer scaffold:

By growing cancer cells within a three-dimensional scaffold rather than on flat surfaces, the team of researchers found that the cells bore closer morphological and biochemical resemblance to tumors in the body. Additionally, engineering tumors that mimic those in vivo offers opportunities to more accurately evaluate such strategies as chemotherapy or radiation therapies, [Mikos] said.

Scaffolds made with polymers are being used more often in medicine as useful tools for building therapeutic implants, reports MedGadget. Their structure replicates the connective tissue in the human body within which cancer cells grow.

The research team found that three-dimensional scaffolds were suitable for growing Ewing’s sarcoma, the second most-common pediatric bone malignancy. The tumor’s profile and protein expression were very different from those characteristics when the tumor is grown in two-dimensional cultures, the team said.

With this information, the team theorized that flat cultures may mask the mechanisms by which tumors develop resistance to anti-cancer therapeutics. The cultures “may lead to erroneous scientific conclusions that complicate our understanding of cancer therapy,” the team wrote.

The next development with the polymer scaffolds is to customize them so that they can more closely represent the conditions inside the body where the tumors are found.

Mikos says:

Tumors in vivo exist within a complex microenvironment consisting of several other cell types and extracellular matrix components. By taking the bottom-up approach and incorporating more components to this current model, we can add layers of complexities to make it increasingly reliable… But we believe what we currently have is very promising. If we can build upon these results, we can potentially develop an excellent predictor of drug efficacy in patients.