MiTuMi | Bioengineered Matrices Mimicking the Lung Tumor Microenvironment

Summary
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality in the world. It most often gets diagnosed at an advanced stage with a 5-year survival rate as low as 5%. Despite recent advances in development of therapeutics, lack of a comprehensive understanding of the complexity and dynamicity of the tumor microenvironment hinders effective clinical outcome. Tumor microenvironment plays a crucial role in tumorigenesis and subsequent disease progression leading to metastasis as well as resistance to therapeutics. Conventional monolayer culturing of tumor cells fails to recapitulate the essential microenvironmental aspects of native tumors whereas mouse models suffer from limited relevance, high cost and low throughput. A three-dimensional (3D) human in vitro tumor model that faithfully mimics the tumor microenvironment is key to advance the current understanding of biological processes and signaling pathways that govern these complex pathological events. I propose a biomimetic human lung tumor model that allows independent tunability and control of aberrant biochemical and mechanical aspects of the tumor microenvironment to study cellular events that govern tumorigenesis (Objective1), metastasis and drug resistance (Objective2) and patient heterogeneity (Objective3). Following a highly interdisciplinary approach where tissue engineering, material science, medicine and molecular biology converges, the implications of a tunable and biomimetic 3D human tumor model is substantial for the future of precision-medicine and development of patient- specific therapeutic regimens.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101032602
Start date: 01-05-2021
End date: 30-04-2023
Total budget - Public funding: 145 355,52 Euro - 145 355,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality in the world. It most often gets diagnosed at an advanced stage with a 5-year survival rate as low as 5%. Despite recent advances in development of therapeutics, lack of a comprehensive understanding of the complexity and dynamicity of the tumor microenvironment hinders effective clinical outcome. Tumor microenvironment plays a crucial role in tumorigenesis and subsequent disease progression leading to metastasis as well as resistance to therapeutics. Conventional monolayer culturing of tumor cells fails to recapitulate the essential microenvironmental aspects of native tumors whereas mouse models suffer from limited relevance, high cost and low throughput. A three-dimensional (3D) human in vitro tumor model that faithfully mimics the tumor microenvironment is key to advance the current understanding of biological processes and signaling pathways that govern these complex pathological events. I propose a biomimetic human lung tumor model that allows independent tunability and control of aberrant biochemical and mechanical aspects of the tumor microenvironment to study cellular events that govern tumorigenesis (Objective1), metastasis and drug resistance (Objective2) and patient heterogeneity (Objective3). Following a highly interdisciplinary approach where tissue engineering, material science, medicine and molecular biology converges, the implications of a tunable and biomimetic 3D human tumor model is substantial for the future of precision-medicine and development of patient- specific therapeutic regimens.

Status

CLOSED

Call topic

MSCA-IF-2020

Update Date

28-04-2024
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.1. EXCELLENT SCIENCE
H2020-EU.1.3. EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
H2020-EU.1.3.2. Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
H2020-MSCA-IF-2020
MSCA-IF-2020 Individual Fellowships