Following Breast Cancer into the Bone

Photo of Erwin Volger and Genevieve Brown

Over the course of a lifetime, more than one in every eight women will be subjected to some form of breast cancer. A quarter of those cancers will metastasize, and a majority of those cancers (60 to 80 percent) will metastasize into the bone. Once in the bone, breast cancer is virtually incurable. Penn State researchers from bioengineering, materials science, and biology are studying the invasion of breast cancer cells into bone using a simple but highly effective device, called a bioreactor, invented by materials scientist Erwin Vogler, that for the first time grows highly complex bone tissue outside of the body.

Using the bioreactor, Vogler's student Genevieve Brown (senior, bioengineering) watches cancer cells attack bone at the molecular and cellular level in what is called single cell infiltration, in which a pioneer cancer cell degrades and penetrates bone tissue creating a path for other cancer cells to follow in line. This process greatly accelerates cancer colonization of bone. "The bioreactor is such a useful device, because it isolates the interactions that take place just when the cancer cells arrive in the bone," Brown explains."It allows you to focus on just those first interactions between cancer and the bone."

Mature bone tissue grown in the bioreactor is complex enough to model actual clinical pathologies, unlike cells grown in petri dishes, but not as complex as opaque whole bone. The researchers have already discovered that cancer progresses slower in less mature bone tissue. Next they will attempt to see which drugs are effective at disrupting cancer’s invasion of the bone.

Erwin Vogler is professor of materials science and engineering. Genevieve Brown’s research is supported by the McNair Scholar’s Program and the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium, for study of bone loss in microgravity.

This research brief was featured in the brochure Biomedical Materials.