Researchers Use Organ-on-a-Chip Technology as a New Model for Liver Cancer Therapies

Study in a Sentence: A novel liver-on-a-chip model can be used to study immune cell interactions in liver cancer and test promising new therapies.

Healthy for Humans: The most common form of liver cancer, hepatocellular cancer, is resistant to conventional cancer therapies and a leading cause of cancer deaths. Although there has been some success with immunotherapy, which uses a patient’s own immune system to fight the cancer, it still does not work for the majority of patients and new therapies are needed.

Redefining Research: This new disease model combines human liver and immune cells in an organ-on-a-chip platform, capturing important biological characteristics of hepatocellular cancer. Researchers successfully demonstrate cellular interactions in the tumor microenvironment, establishing a foundation for developing and testing novel immunotherapies.