MSE brain cancer research featured on Columbus NBC-TV

Watch the news segment about MSE Professor John Lannutti's research to help fight brain cancer, then read the story below for more details about this important medical breakthrough.

Polymer nanofibers that replicate characteristics of human brain tissue are being developed by an Ohio State materials scientist to better understand how cancer cells behave. John Lannutti (left), professor of materials science and engineering, is collaborating on the research with Mariano Viapiano, a researcher at Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Malignant brain tumors often “shed” cells into surrounding healthy brain tissue, making it extremely difficult or impossible to fully prevent tumor recurrence, even after surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. These highly migratory cells often spread by utilizing fibrous tracks that are a natural part of the brain’s inner topography.

Previously, scientists have used flat, rigid plastic petri dishes—a fully two-dimensional environment—to grow and study cancer cells in a laboratory setting. However, the spider web-like polymer nanofibers simulate three-dimensional human tissue. “In traditional petri dishes, the cell sees an infinite surface in all directions with nothing on it,” Lannutti says. “In the three-dimensional cell cultures, the cancer cells move and climb much as they do in human tissue.”

One hundred times skinnier than a human hair, a scanning electron microscope housed in Ohio State’s Campus Electron Optics Facility in Fontana Laboratory is used to view the translucent nanofibers, which can have the exact size and spacing as human brain tissue. “The nanofibers enable us to generate a model outside of the body that simulates how the disease behaves, so that medical researchers can develop treatment more rapidly,” Lannutti says.

Doctors may soon be able to take a biopsy, place it in the medically-approved nanofibers then test the effectiveness of a medicine in the lab first, rather than on the patient. Lannutti notes that the research also has the potential to develop cures for breast and lung cancer as well as a variety of non-cancer diseases.

He adds that the collaboration between cancer research and materials scientists is unique. “It new to me, and it’s new to the field,” says Lannutti, who has been working on the project for four years.

Nanofiber Solutions, a limited liability company, is funding the research though Ohio Third Frontier Program grants and other resources, with plans to commercialize the technology. Nanofiber Solutions has a lab in the TechColumbus business incubator located on the edge of Ohio State’s West Campus.