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According to a study, stiffer breast tissue creates an environment more prone to cancer by enabling the disease to interfere with the surrounding healthy cells. Scientists studying tumor growth and metastasis at the University of Notre Dame fabricated a human tissue model to examine how cancer cells interact with connective tissue in the breast.
The model allowed the team to control the stiffness of the tissue, mimicking healthy and cancerous breast tissue structures. They discovered manipulation of fat cells to be stiffness dependent. Mimicking the physiological environment of the tumor, can be used as a platform to study breast cancer in the human tissue microenvironment.
Fat cells, collagen fibers and epithelial cells make up the microenvironment of breast tissue. Cancer typically appears around the epithelial cells. Previous studies looking at differences between healthy and cancerous tissue found that the cancerous tissue differed in stiffness. Stiff tissue can present a microenvironment susceptible to tumor growth by enabling the cancer cells to modulate its surrounding connective tissue cells.
In tissue with normal stiffness, the cancer cells did not interfere with the state of the surrounding stromal cells. In tests where the tissue was stiffer, the cancer halted the differentiation process of the surrounding fat stem cells, favoring a more stem cell-like state creating a microenvironment that favors a tumor to grow. The results of this study could make the case for tissue engineered human disease models to be used as part of a parallel approach to drug screening before administering those drugs in clinical trials.
haleplushearty.org