{"id":9406,"date":"2016-07-26T11:15:49","date_gmt":"2016-07-26T11:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=9406"},"modified":"2016-07-26T11:15:49","modified_gmt":"2016-07-26T11:15:49","slug":"tiny-3-d-models-may-yield-big-insights-into-ovarian-cancer-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/tiny-3-d-models-may-yield-big-insights-into-ovarian-cancer-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiny 3-D models may yield big insights into ovarian cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"A<\/a>
A normal ovarian epithelial cell clings to a tiny model of an ovarian cancer tumor made with a 3-D printer. The tumor models will help scientists study ovarian cancer in mice, which do not naturally develop the disease. IMAGE COURTESY OF PAUL CAMPAGNOLA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With a unique approach that draws on 3-D printing technologies, a team of University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison researchers is developing new tools for understanding how ovarian cancer develops in women.<\/span><\/p>\n

About 1.5 percent of American women will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer, but most of them will not be diagnosed until late in the disease\u2019s progression \u2014 after the cancer has spread to other parts of the body. This is reflected in the grim outlook for most women: The five-year survival rate for ovarian cancer is about 25 percent.<\/span><\/p>\n

Paul Campagnola<\/span><\/a>, a professor of biomedical engineering and medical physics at UW\u2013Madison, leads a group of researchers aiming to improve that outlook by understanding how ovarian cancer cells interact with nearby body tissue, and by developing new tools for imaging and detecting the disease. With a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, they will use technology they\u2019ve developed on the UW\u2013Madison campus to develop images of tissues from surgical patients. The first target is collagen, a common protein that gives much of the body structure by holding bones, ligaments and muscles together.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"Paul<\/a>
Paul Campagnola<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Campagnola and his colleagues, including\u00a0Kevin Eliceiri<\/span><\/a>, director of UW\u2013Madison\u2019s\u00a0Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation<\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0Manish Patankar<\/span><\/a>, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, hope to eliminate that unknown by printing tiny, 3-D models of the collagen samples.\u201cIn most cancers, including ovarian, there are large changes in the collagen structure that goes along with the disease,\u201d Campagnola says. \u201cIt might happen first. It might be later. It\u2019s actually not known.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The models will be biomimetic \u2014 synthetic, but mimicking biological materials, as Velcro mimics the burs of a plant \u2014 and extremely small. Because, after seeding the models with ovarian cancer cells, the researchers will implant them into mice.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why not simply inject the mice with cancer cells and skip the painstaking imaging and 3-D printing process? Mice don\u2019t get ovarian cancer \u2014 a partial answer for why we still don\u2019t understand ovarian cancer as well as many other cancers.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe current way that people study ovarian cancer in a mouse is very poor,\u201d Campagnola explains. \u201cThey just take human cell lines and then inject them into a mouse. Then some of them will form into a tumor, but most do not.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s different is our tissues will already be 3-D structured,\u201d Campagnola says. \u201cOne problem when people study cancer sometimes is that they put cells in a dish. Cells in a dish don\u2019t act like cells in tissue. So we\u2019re trying to give them the tissue structure that cancer cells would have in a native environment.\u201dBy implanting a 3-D tissue model seeded with ovarian cancer into mice, Campagnola hopes to mimic more closely the conditions of metastatic ovarian cancer in humans.<\/span><\/p>\n

[pullquote]Women with a mutation in a gene called BRCA \u2014 a mutation also implicated in a higher risk for breast cancer \u2014 have a 40 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer in their lifetime.[\/pullquote]<\/p>\n

From there, they\u2019ll study how the implanted tumors grow inside the mice, and hopefully begin to learn more about the cues and processes involved in the disease\u2019s progression and spread.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s an approach that no one has ever attempted, one that will also help improve the way doctors make images of ovaries inside the body.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an integrated approach to improving our imaging capabilities, but then also using our imaging capabilities to make these models so we can study the biology,\u201d Campagnola says.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ultimately, the team\u2019s long-term goal is to improve screening, diagnosis and treatment of ovarian cancer. One of the most effective ways to improve the outlook for women with ovarian cancer is to develop a straightforward method for screening women at higher risk for the disease. Women with a mutation in a gene called BRCA \u2014 a mutation also implicated in a higher risk for breast cancer \u2014 have a 40 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer in their lifetime.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThose are the women we really want to follow,\u201d Campagnola says. \u201cYou could imagine \u2014 we\u2019re a long way off from this \u2014 screening those women every few years with a minimally invasive device through a laparoscope or through the fallopian tubes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But to get to that point, Campagnola says, researchers need to know a lot more about how ovarian cancer works.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to know what you\u2019re looking for,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s why we have all this more basic work to do to get to that point. That\u2019s why we need better imaging tools and we need better models to understand the biology of the disease.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With a unique approach that draws on 3-D printing technologies, a team of University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison researchers is developing new tools for understanding how ovarian cancer develops in women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":9401,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363-150x150.png",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363-300x217.png",300,217,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",496,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",90,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",500,363,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",96,70,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/ovarian-cancer-500x363.png",150,109,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}