In Vitro Model Helps Better Understand Breast Cancer Metastasis

Animals have been traditionally used to understand how cancer cells tend to spread to other organs in the body, a process called metastasis. In particular, breast cancer cells are known to metastasize in the bone, brain, and lung tissues. A group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst led by Shelly Peyton, Ph.D., is working on a new in vitro model composed of a biomaterial screening platform, which recreates brain, lung, and bone marrow tissue, to assess how breast cancer cells adhere and migrate in these tissues. This new method, compared to traditional animal models of cancer metastasis, represents a much more rapid and economical approach to understanding breast cancer cell behavior.