Investigation of migration of breast cancer cells in relation to fibroblasts on a microfluidic system

Date

2024-8

Author

Ildız, Can

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Breast cancer is one of the most common and deadliest types of cancer in the world. Even though it has been studied in the past, the need for a suitable model system mimicking the disease progression and underlying mechanisms of it are still not clear. Current status quo is centred around animal models, which is hard to handle, economically unfeasible and raise ethical concerns for researchers. Therefore, we have developed a microfluidic system that utilizes breast cancer cell lines and fibroblast cells to mimic the tumour microenvironment. Since the cancer related deaths, in most cases, occur as a result of metastasis, we aimed to adapt our proposed microfluidic system to investigate migratory phenotypes of cancer cells in relation to fibroblasts. The migration of breast cancer cells from the microfluidic microchamber towards the micro-channel was examined in order to understand the metastatic potential of cancer cells. To do so, the migration was studied in the presence and absence of fibroblasts using our own microfluidic system which was also developed as part of this project. As a result, this system did provide a relatively economical, practical and reasonable model to study the migration of breast cancer cells facilitated by fibroblasts.

Subject Keywords

Microfluidics, Fibroblasts, Cancer, Migration

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111572

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis