Longitudinal Study of Breast Cancer Cell Invasions and Mammary Gland Responses to Toxicant Exposures Using Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) Functional Imaging

Dr. Lin Yang (UNC)

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer incidence worldwide. An understanding of how the mammary gland responds to toxicant and drug exposures can shed light on mechanisms of breast cancer initiation/progression and therapeutic effectiveness, respectively. However, conventional longitudinal studies of three-dimensional (3D) in vitro mammary models are cumbersome and suffer from a lack of high-throughput assays.

In this study, we established a noninvasive, label-free and high-throughput optical coherence tomography (OCT) functional imaging platform to track exposure-response relationships in 3D human mammary epithelial cell (MEC) organoid models and breast cancer cell invasions in 3D paper-based cultures (PBC). The OCT functional imaging provides micrometer-scale resolution and millimeter-scale depth penetration, with multiple complementary metrics that quantify both morphological changes and subcellular dynamics of the organoids.

The study shows that OCT functional imaging successfully revealed time- and dose-dependent responses of MEC organoids to different toxicants and drugs, with cell line-specific response patterns corresponding to different intracellular motility suppression mechanisms. It also successfully quantified cell distributions in 3D PBCs and tracked the invasion of breast cancer cells over 72 hours. These results establish the utility of OCT functional imaging as a high throughput screening tool for assessing the effects of toxicants/drugs on mammary gland, and set the stage for the future use of OCT in 3D longitudinal studies of environmental toxicants and chemical gradients within the tumor microenvironment.

Email ming.sun@uah.edu for the Zoom meeting information.