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Mechanobiology of Disease

Poster Abstracts

80

26-POS

Board 26

Identifying Metastasis from Mechanical Behavior of Tumor Cells Captured on

Functionalized Substrates

Nuzhat Mansur

1

, Mohammad R. Hasan

1

, Young-Tae Kim

1,2,3

,

Samir Iqbal

1,2,3

.

1

University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA,

2

University of Texas Southwestern

Medical Center at Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA,

3

University of Texas at Arlington, ARLINGTON,

TX, USA.

The metastatic tumor cells invade tissues and spread to other organs. There are a number of

chemical and mechanical interactions all the way from when these cells leave primary cancer

site, propagate through the circulatory system, and reach other organs. One way to screen for

cancer in a person is to look for cancer cells in bloodstream. Detection of such circulating tumor

cells (CTCs) in blood can thus be employed for diagnosing cancer at early stages. In this work,

we present results of a platform where CTCs from blood were captured on a functionalized

substrate. The mechanical behavior of captured cells clearly distinguished not only tumorous

cells from normal cells but also showed well-defined behavior difference between metastatic and

indolent cancer cells. An anti-EGFR aptamer was used to capture CTCs on glass chips. The

breast cancer cells were mixed with rat blood followed by the introduction of red blood cell lysis

buffer. The sample then had only WBCs and cancer cells in the serum. The cells captured on

anti-EGFR aptamer functionalized substrate were imaged for 15 minutes and analyzed with

custom written MATLAB program routines to extract data. It was observed that the CTCs

vigorously changed their shapes over time. The mechanical behavior of the cells was measured

in terms of convexity, average radial distance, bounding box area and cell compactness. It was

clearly evident that captured tumor cells on functionalized surface were distinguishable from

WBCs. Furthermore, metastatic tumor cells showed much more “alive and kicking” behavior

than indolent tumor cells. This approach can be used as an important modality to screen for

cancer and to identify metastatic potential of a given sample.