Friday, February 17, 2012

Brown researchers create 3-D brain tumor model

By Patricia Resende, Correspondent

Researchers at Brown University have developed a 3-D model of a glioma (brain tumor) to enable researchers to analyze the effectiveness of specific therapies to fight brain tumors.

Using the 3-D, living-tissue brain tumor model, researchers will study the formation, growth and the action of endothelial cells (which make up the lining of blood vessels) that attach to a tumor just as they would study that of a living organism.

The model and blood vessels that surround it was developed by Don Ho, a Brown University chemist, under the direction of Shouhang Sun, a Brown University chemistry professor. The model is based on a concept created by Jeffrey Morgan, a bioengineer at Brown. Morgan created a tissue model and Ho added to that concept by creating a polymer hydrogel mold from rat cell tumors and cells from cow vessels.

In experiments, researchers discovered that iron-oxide nanoparticles penetrated the blood vessels that keep the tumor alive with oxygen and nutrients. The iron-oxide nanoparticles are significant, according to researchers, because they are taken up by endothelial cells and can be tracked with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) instead of testing the blood vessels with petri dish cultures.

The 3-D model mimics what would happen naturally in real life and would save researchers time and money and would also decrease the number of tests in living organisms, Ho and his colleagues wrote in the medical journal Theranostics. Additional authors include Chenjie Xu, who earned his doctorate at Brown and works at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Brown researchers Nathan Kohler and Aruna Sigdel and Raghu Kalluri from Harvard Medical School.

The study was supported by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes for Health, the National Science Foundation, the Rhode Island Biotechnology/Biomanufacturing Training Initiative and the Brown Department of Diagnostic Imaging Fund.