微流控芯片在乳腺癌骨转移研究中的应用

The Application of Microfluidic Techniques on Bone Metastasis of Breast Cancer

乳腺癌骨转移患者死亡率高达70%~80%,目前缺乏有效的治疗药物.微流控芯片技术能够有效模拟骨组织的生化和生物物理微环境,便捷地实现模拟骨微环境中乳腺癌骨转移的研究,这将为探索乳腺癌骨转移的细胞和分子机制、进而进行抗乳腺癌骨转移药物高通量筛选提供有价值的技术方法和平台.本综述简要介绍了乳腺癌骨转移的分子机制和治疗药物研究现状,详细阐述了乳腺癌骨转移的微流控芯片模型,分析了基于微流控芯片技术进行抗乳腺癌骨转移药物高通量筛选的优势和挑战,旨在为乳腺癌骨转移机制研究和药物筛选提供参考.

A lack of effective treatments for patients suffered from breast cancer with bone metastasis are caused by limited in vitro models and unsuitable animal models, which leads to 70%~80% mortality rate. Microfluidics enabled bone-on-a-chip could facilitate the resemblance of the biochemical and biophysical microenvironment of native bone tissues, which could readily be incorporated with the occurrence of breast cancer so as to recapture the bone metastasis in a single chip. The microscale chip design could be scaled up with high throughput/content settings so as to uncover the molecular mechanisms existing in bone metastasis of breast cancer and screen effective drugs for it more efficiently. In this review, we first introduce the current mechanistic understanding on bone metastasis of breast cancer and existing drugs for this disease. We then summarized the microfluidic models used for recapturing bone metastasis phenomena. We also presented high throughput designs aiming for more efficient drug discovery and development. Lastly, we discuss the advantages and challenges existing in combining high throughput setting and microfluidic models aiming for effective drug screening targeting bone metastasis of breast cancer. Together, we hope to provide a clue on how effective treatments could be discovered in the future so as to decrease the high mortality rate of bone metastasis of breast cancer.