Oncoimmunology Meets Organs-on-Chip.

Fabrizio Mattei,Sara Andreone,Arianna Mencattini,Luca Businaro,Eugenio Martinelli,Giovanna Schiavoni,Adele De Ninno

doi:10.3389/fmolb.2021.627454

Abstract

Oncoimmunology represents a biomedical research discipline coined to study the roles of immune system in cancer progression with the aim of discovering novel strategies to arm it against the malignancy. Infiltration of immune cells within the tumor microenvironment is an early event that results in the establishment of a dynamic cross-talk. Here, immune cells sense antigenic cues to mount a specific anti-tumor response while cancer cells emanate inhibitory signals to dampen it. Animals models have led to giant steps in this research context, and several tools to investigate the effect of immune infiltration in the tumor microenvironment are currently available. However, the use of animals represents a challenge due to ethical issues and long duration of experiments. Organs-on-chip are innovative tools not only to study how cells derived from different organs interact with each other, but also to investigate on the crosstalk between immune cells and different types of cancer cells. In this review, we describe the state-of-the-art of microfluidics and the impact of OOC in the field of oncoimmunology underlining the importance of this system in the advancements on the complexity of tumor microenvironment.

Highlights

Microfluidic platforms represent an emergent and promising technology for life science research aiming to reproduce specific biological environments that recapitulate the in vivo scenario with higher fidelity with respect to conventional in vitro techniques (Jiménez-Díaz et al, 2019; Wang L. et al, 2019)
We describe the state-of-the-art of microfluidic devices and explain how and why the advent of microfluidic platforms markedly impacted the study of multicellular systems with emphasis on their employment for oncoimmunology studies
This study demonstrates that an OOC system hold potential for further implementation by adding other tumor microenvironment (TME) key cell components, such as cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs)

Summary

Introduction

Microfluidic platforms represent an emergent and promising technology for life science research aiming to reproduce specific biological environments that recapitulate the in vivo scenario with higher fidelity with respect to conventional in vitro techniques (Jiménez-Díaz et al, 2019; Wang L. et al, 2019). This work is a clear example of how CC studies inspired experimental implementations to design the more complex OOC systems, in order to study the interaction between immune cells and cancer within ad hoc fabricated microfluidic devices. The term OOC underlines the attempt to load different cell types residing organs or multicellular complexes inside a microfluidic device, often coupled to sophisticated microscopy systems.

Results

Conclusion