Homing Choices of Breast Cancer Cells Revealed by Tissue Specific Invasion and Extravasation Lab-on-a-chip Platforms

Metastasis is one of the major obstacles for breast cancer patients. Limitations of current models demand the development of novel platforms to predict metastatic potential and homing choices of cancer cells. Here, two novel Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) platforms, invasion/chemotaxis (IC-chip) and extravasation (EX-chip), are presented for the quantitative assessment of invasion and extravasation, towards specific tissues. On IC-chip, invasive MDA-MB-231, but not non-invasive MCF-7 breast cancer cells invaded lung and liver microenvironments. Lung-specific but not bone-specific MDA-MB-231 clones efficiently invaded lung microenvironment, stressing ability of IC-chip to demonstrate different in vivo metastatic behaviors. On EX-chip, MDA-MB-231 cells extravasated more into the lung microenvironment compared to the liver and breast highlighting the potency of the platform to mimic in vivo homing choices. Overall, this study presents IC-chip and EX-chip that can determine tissue-specific invasion and extravasation potentials of cancer cells providing the groundwork for novel diagnostic tools to predict metastasis risk.