“A tissue-engineered pancreatic cancer model for dissecting the roles of lymphatic vessels in tumor immunity”

Yansong (Harry) Peng, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, has received IFER funding from 2022-2024 for his project, “A tissue-engineered pancreatic cancer model for dissecting the roles of lymphatic vessels in tumor immunity.” Pancreatic cancer remains one of the most lethal forms of cancer, with less than 10% of patients surviving past 5 years. Although there is an FDA-approved immunotherapy for the disease, fewer than 10% of patients respond to it, and questions remain about how to make immunotherapies more effective treatments. Some think the resistance to immunotherapy is caused by defects in lymphatic vessels which increase the interstitial fluid pressure in the tumors and reduce the ability of immune cells to enter. In this proposal, Yansong seeks to create a 3D microfluidic model of vascularized pancreatic cancer tumors in a device containing blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, and pancreatic cancer cells. He can mimic the interstitial fluid flow found in normal and tumor tissues and examine the impact this has on infiltration of immune cells and response to cancer immunotherapies. The pancreatic cancer on a chip model has the potential to provide a better understanding of the mechanism of immunity to immunotherapies and to also serve as a platform for the screening of drugs for this condition, while reducing the use of animal models for this purpose.