Cancer cells are a wily adversary.
Cancer cells are a wily adversary. One reason the disease outfoxes many potential treatments is because of the diversity of the cancer cell population. Researchers have found this population difficult to characterize and quantify.
A Cornell-led team took a novel, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the behavior of breast tumor cells by employing a statistical modeling technique more commonly used in physics and economics. The team was able to demonstrate how the diversity, or heterogeneity, of cancer cells can be influenced by their chemical environment – namely, by interactions with a specific protein, which leads to tumor growth.
The researchers’ paper, “Lymphoidal Chemokine CCL19 Promoted the Heterogeneity of the Breast Tumor Cell Motility Within a 3D Microenvironment Revealed by a Lévy Distribution Analysis,” published Feb. 14 in Integrative Biology.
Read more at Cornell University
Image: A research team led by Mingming Wu worked with CNF to fabricate this microfluidic chip containing four identical three-channel devices. The team put breast tumor cells and the chemokine protein CCL19 into each device and then used open-source software to analyze the cancer cell behavior. CREDIT: Cornell University
