Rice University bioengineers have created a scalable 3D-printed platform that mass-produces realistic cancer cell clusters, opening a new window into how tumors survive in the bloodstream and spread through the body. The work could guide future drugs that disrupt metastasis before it takes hold.
A Rice University team has built a new 3D-printed platform that lets scientists grow realistic clusters of cancer cells at scale, offering a powerful new way to study how tumors spread through the body.
The system, called the Advanced Tumor Landscape Analysis System, or ATLAS, is designed to tackle one of the toughest problems in cancer research: metastasis, the process by which cancer cells break away from a primary tumor, travel through the bloodstream and seed new tumors elsewhere.
Metastasis is responsible for most cancer deaths, yet it remains extremely difficult to study in the lab. Cancer cells in the body experience complex physical forces and interact with a mix of other cell types as they circulate — conditions that standard flat lab dishes cannot reproduce.
That gap has held the field back, according to Michael King, Rice’s E.D. Butcher Professor of Bioengineering and a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Scholar.
“Metastasis is still poorly understood because adequate laboratory techniques to recreate this complex process are lacking,” King said in a news release.
ATLAS aims to change that by making it faster and cheaper to generate large numbers of three-dimensional cancer cell clusters that behave more like those found in patients’ bodies.
The platform was developed in King’s lab. The research team built on earlier work using superhydrophobic surfaces — materials that strongly repel water, like the surface of a lotus leaf.
On these water-repelling surfaces, droplets containing cells bead up instead of spreading out. That simple physical effect nudges cells to stick to one another and form compact, three-dimensional aggregates rather than thin layers.
First author Alexandria Carter, a doctoral student in the King lab, explained that the key is mimicking how nature creates such water-shedding surfaces.
“The way this is achieved, both in nature and in the laboratory, is to create a surface that is rough on a nanoscale level, and then to coat the nanoscale bumps with a nonwetting substance such as Teflon or wax,” Carter said in the news release.
In the past, making those kinds of specialized surfaces could be slow and expensive. The Rice team’s innovation was to use 3D printing to create microwell arrays — tiny pits that each hold a droplet — and then treat them to become superhydrophobic.
“Here, we achieved this for the first time through 3D printing, which means the method is scalable and easily adoptable by other labs,” Carter added.
Because the microwell plates can be printed in bulk and customized, ATLAS lowers the barrier for labs that want to run many experiments in parallel. That high-throughput capability is critical for metastasis research, where scientists need to test how different cell types, drug candidates or physical conditions affect cancer’s ability to spread.
Once the platform was built, the Rice team moved beyond method development and put ATLAS to work on a pressing biological question: how prostate cancer cells survive the harsh environment of the bloodstream.
They used the system to grow clusters of prostate cancer cells, both alone and mixed with a type of support cell called cancer-associated fibroblasts, or CAFs. These stromal cells are not cancerous themselves but are commonly found in and around tumors and are known to influence how cancers grow and invade nearby tissue.
By exposing the ATLAS-grown clusters to conditions that mimic blood flow, the researchers found that cancer cells traveling in groups were more likely to survive than those moving alone. Clusters that included CAFs were especially resilient.
The experiments suggested that CAFs act as protective escorts, helping cancer cells withstand the mechanical stresses of circulation and continue to grow once they reach new sites in the body.
Carter emphasized that dual impact — a new tool and new biology — is what makes the work stand out.
“One of the most exciting elements of our paper is that it does not just report on a new experimental method for other researchers to use, but it also reports new fundamental biological results,” she said.
Those results, published in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials, could eventually shape how doctors treat advanced prostate cancer.
“Perhaps in the future the next generation of prostate cancer drugs will target these CAF ‘escorts’ as a way to prevent metastasis,” added Carter.
For now, ATLAS offers a more realistic and practical way to model metastasis in the lab. Because it is relatively low-cost and easy to reproduce, it could help more research groups explore how different cancers spread and test strategies to block that process before it becomes life-threatening.
The platform also highlights how engineering and entrepreneurship can accelerate medical innovation.
Carter recently completed the Rice Innovation Fellows program, run by the university’s Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie). The program helps doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers turn their lab discoveries into real-world solutions.
She is now working to launch a startup, Bionostic, to commercialize ATLAS so that hospitals, biotech companies and academic labs can use it without having to build the technology from scratch.
Lilie Executive Director Kyle Judah said that “a pre-requisite for bringing research beyond the bench is to be deeply passionate about the problem space, and Carter is the perfect example of an exceptionally driven and committed engineer willing this idea into reality.”
As ATLAS moves from a single lab to a broader community of users, King sees it as a way to speed up progress against one of cancer’s deadliest features.
“ATLAS makes it easier to study one of the most dangerous aspects of cancer,” he said.
If more scientists can probe how cancer cells travel, survive and colonize new tissues, they may be better equipped to design therapies that cut off metastasis at its roots — turning a once-mysterious process into a more manageable target for treatment.
Source: Rice University