BIOBRIEF
Columbia's chip, built from a patient's own stem cells, is the first model of the colonization step, the phase of metastasis where most cancer drugs have failed.
Drugs aimed at stopping cancer from spreading have largely failed, in part because researchers could not watch the colonization step in living human tissue: cancer cells crossing a blood-vessel wall, settling into a distant organ, and reshaping the local environment to survive. A Columbia University team led by Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic has built the first patient-specific model of that step, [published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine](https://www.genengnews.com/topics/cancer/human-multi-organ-chip-offers-new-insight-into-cancer-metastasis/).
The chip is roughly the size of a microscope slide and contains millimeter-scale engineered bone and lung compartments, all built from the same patient's induced pluripotent stem cells (adult cells reprogrammed into a flexible, embryonic-like state). A vascular channel circulates human breast cancer cells between the compartments, mimicking the bloodstream that carries tumors from organ to organ. In a demonstration, the team tracked breast cancer cells as they crossed into the bone and lung tissue and began remodeling it into a pre-metastatic niche, the local changes that let a new tumor take hold.
Metastasis is the direct cause of at least two-thirds of cancer deaths, and the program that produced the chip is funded by NIH R01 CA249799, awarded in 2020 under the working title "Cancer patient on a chip." Independent coverage from news-medical.net and bioengineer.org confirms the same construction, study team, and niche-remodeling finding.
The chip is a research tool, not a treatment, and turning its findings into approved drugs remains a multi-year endeavor. The platform gives researchers a tunable human system for probing which molecular pathways drive colonization, and for screening therapies before animal or human trials.