Mechanobiology Based Prediction of Metastatic Invasiveness of Pancreatic Tumors

Metastases are the main cause of cancer-related mortality. A critical step in metastases formation is invasion of cancer cells through tissue. Invading metastatic cells are dynamic, rapidly changing morphology and applying forces to their surroundings. Evaluating forceful interactions of cells on an impenetrable, physiological-stiffness, synthetic gel, we have previously shown that a subset of invasive breast-cancer cells will indent the gel while benign cells do not. Specifically, we rapidly and quantitatively evaluate the mechanical invasiveness of the cells through the amounts of indenting cells and their attained depths; the measure is independent of tumor genetics and relies only on the invasive capacity of the cells. Recently, we have extended the work to pancreatic cancer utilizing both cells lines and patient-derived pancreatic tumor samples for clinical relevance. We show that results obtained in cell lines match fresh, human samples. Moreover, our results provide a same-day prognosis for the cancer aggressiveness, with high correlation to the clinical outcome of patients that is obtained only after days or weeks.