Multiscale Mechanobiology of Breast Cancer

The scope of this project is to engineer three-dimensional cell culture platforms for cancer mechanobiology research. These platforms will be designed to mimic either physiological (control) or pathological (tumourous) microenvironments. Our approach relies on proteins from the extracellular matrix, which we will manipulate to generate a variety of scaffolds with controlled composition, microarchitecture, and mechanics. Various (cancerous and noncancerous) cell lines will be tested to understand how scaffolds' properties affect cell functions, such as cell adhesion, migration as well as pro-angiogenic and pro-inflammatory secretions, all relevant functions to unravel primary tumour growth and metastasis pathways.