Megan Schafer
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Carole Parent
Co-Presenter:
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Pharmacology / Medicine
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Session 2 – 11am – 11:50am
Room: League Ballroom
Authors: Megan Schafer, Kristen Loesel, Carole Parent
Presenter: 109
Abstract
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the world, 1 in 8 women are likely to develop the disease at some point in life. Breast cancer can be very treatable in the early stages when it is concentrated in the breast tissue, but once cancer cells invade surrounding healthy tissue, a process called metastasis, the effectiveness of treatment diminishes. Evidence has found that collagen fibers surrounding murine mammary tumors can influence the movement of breast cancer cells, facilitating their migration to other parts of the body. It is well known that cancer cells are able to migrate along fibers using a process called contact guidance, but the influence of fiber architectures on cancer cell movement is still not well known. The metastasis of breast cancer has not been researched sufficiently and should be explored further. Our research involves visualizing how breast cancer cells migrate on fibrous surfaces. We use a process called electrospinning, which is a widely used fiber production method to create 2D, synthetic fiber mats with different fiber orientations using glass plates as a control to see how breast cancer cells move along the fibers. We utilize multiple breast cancer cell lines from various types of breast cancer (TNBC, HER2+) to see if they sense fibers in the same way using live cell imaging and immunofluorescence staining. We previously showed that two types of triple negative breast cancer cells (M4 and MDA-MB-231) sense complex topographies in a cell type dependent way, meaning they move on asymmetric surfaces in different directions due to changes in cell-ECM interactions. To understand why these cells respond differently to the same fibrous surfaces, we used immunofluorescence staining to visualize changes in the cytoskeleton. In addition, we used live cell imaging to quantify cell speed and cell directionality on different fibrous surfaces. We found that the two highly invasive cell lines had a much stronger contact guidance, showing that the invasive ability of cells correlates to the contact guidance potential.
Biomedical Sciences, Natural/Life Sciences
