Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting | Singapore

Mechanobiology of Disease

Poster Abstracts

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.

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