NWO Exact and Natural Sciences has honored twenty-six applications in the Open Competition Science-ENW-M. These grants are intended for innovative, fundamental research of high quality and/or scientific urgency. One of the awarded projects is the project ‘Elucidating how tumor cells build the pre-metastatic liver niche using an advanced liver sinusoid organ-on-chip model – LivMetOoC’ by Séverine Le Gac from the University of Twente together with Wytske van Weerden from Erasmus MC. Two PhD students will bring together the expertise of both groups to develop a micro-liver to investigate which factors play a role in liver metastases.
Liver metastasis is a lethal condition that affects multiple cancer types. We do not well understand what liver factors drive cancer cells to infiltrate and grow into metastases. To get better insights into this process, we will build a miniaturized model of the liver and investigate the interplay between the liver tissue and tumour cells when they enter the liver vasculature. This project will shed new light on how the liver environment can foster tumour cells to form a pre-metastatic niche, which is instrumental to develop targeted interventions against liver metastasis, possibly using the same human liver model.
Séverine Le Gac (l) and Wytske van Weerden (r)
Link to the press release: https://www.nwo.nl/en/news/twenty-six-innovative-research-projects-launched-through-open-competition-domain-science-m
