Michael King
Rice University, TX·Biomedical Engineering
Cancer becomes deadly largely when it spreads, and spreading often happens through the bloodstream. Tumor cells that enter the blood, called circulating tumor cells (CTCs), face strong forces from flowing blood, known as shear stress.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Biology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
cancer metastasis
circulating tumor cells
shear stress
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Build a high-throughput shear stress device based on a BioJet printer and multiwell plates, and use it to measure calcium influx, membrane and mitochondrial damage, and cell death in prostate cancer cells.
- Develop and characterize 'mechanoresistant' prostate cancer cell lines that survive repeated high shear pulses, to identify drivers of cancer cell survival in circulation.
- Characterize circulating tumor cell clusters from prostate cancer patient blood, and test how model aggregates containing supporting stromal cells hold up and survive under shear flow.
- Compare mechanoresistant and parental cancer cells, and injected cell aggregates, in mouse models of metastasis to test how shear sensitivity affects tumor burden.
More about the research
Much is known about how cancer cells sense forces inside solid tumors, but far less is known about how they respond in blood flow. This team has previously shown two things. Shear stress boosts the killing of CTCs by TRAIL, a protein that triggers cell death. Cancer cells can also survive extremely high pulses of shear stress, much like blood cells. This project develops tools to find what lets cancer cells survive in circulation.
Why it matters
Identifying what lets cancer cells survive the forces of blood flow could reveal new ways to block metastasis, the spread of cancer through the bloodstream. This could benefit patients with prostate cancer and other cancers. The new shear-testing technology may also give researchers a practical tool for studying how tumor cells respond to fluid flow.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Agnieszka Truszkowska
University of Alabama in Huntsville, AL·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Build a computational model of how circulating tumor cell (CTC) clusters move through the bloodstream, including their surroundings, interactions with other cells, and cell-to-cell signaling.
Nathan Swami
University of Virginia, VA·Biomedical Engineering
Generate pancreatic cancer cells spanning a range of hybrid epithelial–mesenchymal states by co-culturing them with cancer-associated fibroblasts in a perfusable system under shear stress and hypoxia, validated by immunofluorescence.
John McAuliffe
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether pancreatic cancer cells circulating in the blood or spread to organs like the liver express NR2F1, a gene-switching receptor linked to dormancy, in mice and in human patients.
The school
Rice University: 24 labs on PI Pages, $278M a year on research, 267 research doctorates a year.
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