Professor Séverine Le Gac has been awarded an ENW-M2 grant by the Dutch Research Council NWO. With this grant, she will develop a micro-liver in order to investigate which factors play a role in liver metastases.
Member of the Organ-on-Chip Centre Twente, Séverine Le Gac is a full professor within the Faculty of EEMCS in the group Applied Microfluidics for BioEngineering Research (AMBER). Her research interests focus on the use of microfluidic devices, such as organs-on-chips (OoC), for biological and medical applications, which work will now be supported by her newly awarded grant.
The project ‘LivMetOoC’
With the LivMetOoC project, whose full title is ‘Elucidating how tumour cells build the pre-metastatic liver niche using an advanced liver sinusoid organ-on-chip model’, Le Gac will join forces for the first time with Wytske van Weerden from Erasmus MC (Erasmus Medical Centre). Together, they will supervise two PhD candidates to connect the expertise of both groups.
Liver metastasis is a lethal condition that comprises multiple types of cancer. We do not understand properly which factors inside the liver drive the cancer cells found in the blood circulation that enables those to infiltrate and grow into metastases. To gain better insight into this process, Le Gac will build a miniaturised model of the liver and investigate the interplay between the tumour cells and liver tissue, where the latter is challenged with circulating tumour cells added to its vasculature. This project is aimed to shed new light on how the liver environment can foster tumour cells to form a pre-metastatic niche, which is instrumental to develop targeted interventions against liver metastasis, possibly using the same human liver OoC model.
Start of the project
The project will start in the spring of 2023 after the appointment of a PhD candidate at each location, being the University of Twente and Erasmus MC. The project has been designed in such a way that the PhD student located at the University of Twente will focus on technical and engineering aspects, with the early biological validation of the liver sinusoid-on-chip model and associated set-up. The other PhD candidate, at Erasmus MC, will conduct in-depth molecular analysis before and after exposure to circulating tumour cells, as well as high-content imaging experiments. Joint tasks between the two PhD candidates have been scheduled in order to ensure a smooth technology- and knowledge transfer between the two research groups.
About the grant
The NWO Domain Science honours multiple rounds of applications in the Open Competition call. These grants are intended for innovative, fundamental research that will yield impact. The M2 variant of the grant allows recipients of the grant to supervise two researchers for intensive and complementary collaboration between two research groups.
