And it was featured in a commentary article by Dr. Olivier De Wever.
aacrjournals.org/cancerres/ar...

I've had one nostalgia meal in Canton and will likely have another before the week is done.

And checkout our collaborators in the Duncan lab via the NCI-UMD partnership program and former PhD Dr. Devorah Cahn while you're at it:

And 2 posters on 3D modeling the tumor stroma:

We have 3 talks on Thursday and Friday on #immunoengineering

We hope this will play a role in synthetic niche engineering and drug discovery. Thanks for reading! (reposted due to not having enough tea)

This means we can decouple ECM effects from tumors using in vitro 3D models. Traditional 3D spheroids are a no-ECM condition compared to MatriSpheres with a tissue-specific ECM stroma. You can’t do this with other models that require ECM to form the 3D structure

A really important discovery was that MatriSpheres matched the transcriptome of in vivo tumors via scRNAseq. Scissor analysis showed high similarity to the SIS MatriSpheres, with a smaller subset showing similarity to cells alone. Tumors are heterogeneous after all.

An unexpected finding was that this assembly is completely cell-dependent. These are not gels! (like when you embed cells in Matrigel for organoids). Rather it’s localized cell mediated ECM assembly. Rheologically, nothing happens without cells.

We discovered that we can co-assemble cancer cells and ECM into 3D structures in high-throughput methods that are as easy as spheroids! We process into ECM hydrogel precursors + cancer cells in the right conditions and MatriSpheres emerge with collagen rich stroma

ECM is complex to say the least and we wanted a flexible method to capture that complexity or study individual ECM molecules. Decellularized intestine (SIS) maintains tissue specific ECM composition (via proteomics) and is more similar to tumor ECM than other biomaterials

We created a new in vitro model: self-assembling 3D “MatriSpheres” from decellularized matrix (ECM) to mimic colorectal tumor microenvironments. This is exciting because (1) its a novel method to make ECM dense niches (2) MatriSpheres matched in vivo tumors via scRNAseq

The paint is dry and it looks really good! Iris is a talented artist-scientist.

Thanks to to @Sanjay_Pal7 for the excellent job and the NCI IRP @NCIResearchCtr for support.