UMD Doctoral Student Patents Device That Mimics Spread of Early-Stage Cancer
First-of-Its-Kind Model Could Help Customize Drug Treatments
By John Tucker
Ian Smith displays an early iteration of a device he recently patented. The invention could help clinicians test drugs on the cells of a patient in a lab setting, prior to injecting potentially ineffective drugs directly into the patient's body.
Photos courtesy of Ian Smith
In middle school, Ian Smith lost a close friend to leukemia. Soon after, his grandmother’s cancer diagnosis resulted in a mastectomy. When Smith was applying for Ph.D. programs, his father was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and rapidly declined.
Smith moved back to his family’s home in Silver Spring, Md., where he routinely carried his weakened dad up the stairs and cared for him after strokes. He also enrolled at the University of Maryland, drawn to a lab in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering that combined his interests of cancer research and microscale models.
His father died nine months after his diagnosis. But Smith, now a fifth-year doctoral student, has recently patented a device that could improve drug treatments for future cancer patients.
A diagram of Smith's "tumor on a chip" model
Smith’s model is part of what’s commonly called “tumor on a chip” technology, but his device goes further, replicating not only a tumor built from real cancer cells, but also an adjoining blood vessel made from endothelial cells, which are biologically responsible for bringing nutrients to tumors. Through imaging, clinicians using the device could observe how the cancer cells in his model detach from the tumor and invade the vessel, just as they would inside the body, answering questions about how cancer spreads.
The tiny creation is designed to personalize cancer medicine. With his model, doctors can culture biopsied cells from individual patients, then test different drugs on those unique cells in a lab setting to determine which medications prevent their spread and which ones do not. The approach would eliminate trial and error with drugs administered directly to patients that could be ineffective or damage the body.
“Anyone who’s been around someone undergoing a drug like chemo can see how it can take the life out of them, creating almost as much harm as the cancer itself,” Smith said. “This device allows you to test the effects of chemo on a person’s cancer cells before actually putting the drug into the person.”
Though other researchers have designed similar prototypes, Smith’s is thought to be novel because it creates an environment that can be fine-tuned and is easier to image and to control than other models.
After earning an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Smith entered UMD with an interest in vascular research. He was familiar with “chip” technology, which allows for the experimentation of the cultured cell structures in collagen, encapsulated by a small piece of plastic. One day he wondered if he could apply the technique to see if a tumor and vessel would interact with each other in a more sophisticated way than the oversimplified models in existence.
“Multiple people said it couldn’t be built,” Smith recalled. “I wanted to prove them wrong.”
After securing a grant from the International Foundation for Ethical Research, Smith obtained biopsied cells from breast cancer patients and clumped them together to mimic a tumor inside a collagen hydrogel. After engineering a vessel, he infused it with a nutrient-rich liquid to simulate blood flow, then he placed it near the tumor within his device and waited.
Within the body, vessels and cancer cells naturally move toward each other, as cancer cells crave nutrients and vessels seek to oxygenate starved cells. Cancer cells can enter the smaller vessels that sprout out and penetrate the tumor, allowing more cancer cells to spread to other organs.
The design process hit snags over the course of more than year. Smith created a dozen unsuccessful models before landing on one that mimicked metastasis. As he observed the results, colleagues snapped a photo capturing an elated Smith.
Associate Professor Kimberly Stroka, who runs the cell and microenvironment engineering lab where Smith created his product, called it innovative. “It gives us an understanding of how tumor cells talk to the vessels and how vessels cells talk to the tumor,” she said. “That’s incredibly important from a science perspective.”
Smith recently earned a Fischell Fellowship in biomedical engineering, awarded to UMD graduate students who apply research and product design to the biomedical industry. These days, he has been introducing different variables to his model, like cancer cells with varying degrees of aggression and collagen with different levels of stiffness. He also is exploring ways to package, store and ship his product, hoping it can be brought to market in as early as five years.
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