Biophysical interactions between pancreatic cancer cells and pristine carbon nanotube substrates: Potential application for pancreatic cancer tissue engineering

Abstract

Novel synthetic biomaterials able to support direct tissue growth and retain cellular phenotypical properties are promising building blocks for the development of tissue engineering platforms for accurate and fast therapy screening for cancer. The aim of this study is to validate an aligned, pristine multi-walled carbon nanotube (CNT) platform for in vitro studies of pancreatic cancer as a systematic understanding of interactions between cells and these CNT substrates is lacking. Our results demonstrate that our CNT scaffolds-which are easily tuneable to form sheets/fibers-support growth, proliferation, and spatial organization of pancreatic cancer cells, indicating their great potential in cancer tissue engineering. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part B: Appl Biomater, 106B: 1637-1644, 2018.

A 3D bioinspired highly porous polymeric scaffolding system forin vitrosimulation of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

“…72 In terms of morphological characteristics within the 3D scaffold, as veried by SEM imaging, the AsPC-1 cells retained their foci-like epithelial shape (Fig. 3a), 79,80 while PANC-1 cells had an elongated epithelial morphology (Fig. 3b).…”

“…We have previously reported this formation of PANC-1 cellular masses in carbon nanotube based lms. 80 FN is considered to interact with the cell surface integrin receptors, which may result in enhancing the cell-cell interactions and consequently leading to cell clustering. 75,91 This evidence is further supported by the group of Da Rocha-Azevedo et al, who showed that the cell contraction in clustering requires the presence of FN.…”

Chemoradiotherapy screening in a novel biomimetic polymer based pancreatic cancer model

“…2 More recently, 3D in vitro models have emerged and are being developed as low cost, promising alternatives to animals. 7,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] However, most studies focus on the development of the actual 3D model and, to the best of our knowledge, there are very limited 3D studies on PDAC treatment screening (chemotherapy and radiotherapy) with most studies conducted in 3D spheroids (cell aggregates). 14,32,[34][35][36][49][50][51][52] Generally, these studies report a higher resistance of PDAC to treatment in 3D when compared to 2D cultures, a trend which is in closer alignment with in vivo studies.…”

Overview of Carbon Nanotubes for Biomedical Applications

“…Cell differentiation was also enhanced when the growth took place on DWCNT [37]. Raw (non-functionalised) aligned MWCNT successfully sustained the growth and proliferation of pancreatic cancer cells, exhibiting a new approach for the study of this kind of cancer [38].…”