Engineering a Tumour on a Chip - How Cutting-Edge Cancer Research is Helping to Improve Treatments

Meet Dr Joash Joy, a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Fran Balkwill’s lab at the Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London. Dr Joy is working on engineering artificial tumours to explore how cancer therapies can be made more effective. He uses a pioneering approach known as ‘tumour on a chip’ that replicates the complex and dynamic nature of tumours in living organisms – something simpler models often fail to achieve.

In the lab’s latest research, Dr Joy uses a tumour-on-a-chip model of ovarian cancer to investigate how it interacts with CAR-T cell therapy – an innovative type of therapy that trains our own immune system to recognise and fight cancer cells. While this therapy has been highly successful in treating blood cancers such as leukaemia, it has not been as effective against solid tumours such as ovarian cancer.

One reason may be that these cancer cells form part of an incredibly intricate neighbourhood that also includes immune cells, blood vessels, and even healthy cells, in addition to a cocktail of different chemical signals, altogether known as the tumour microenvironment. These factors may combine to suppress immune responses against the cancer cells, blocking the effects of CAR-T cells.

By accurately modelling how cancer cells and CAR-T cells interact within a realistic microenvironment, Dr Joy and Professor Balkwill’s lab aim to uncover insights that could lead to improved treatments for patients with solid tumours.

In this video, we meet Dr Joy, take a look inside the intricate tumour models he has developed, and learn how this research could help make immunotherapies more effective for a broader range of patients.

Credits
🙏 This work was made possible thanks to funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance and Cancer Research UK.
📰 Original paper (and tumour films): Joy et al. Cancer Research (2024) 84 (15): 2432–2449.
🎵 Music: The Farmhouse by Silver Maple (CC BY 4.0)

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