Stress Clamp Experiments on Multicellular Tumor Spheroids

TL;DR

This study investigates how applied mechanical stress influences tumor spheroid growth, revealing that 10 kPa stress significantly inhibits proliferation, especially in the spheroid core, supported by experimental and numerical modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental method to apply and measure mechanical stress effects on tumor spheroids and compares results with a simple numerical model.

Findings

10 kPa stress drastically reduces spheroid growth

Proliferation inhibition mainly occurs in the spheroid core

Experimental results align with the numerical model

Abstract

The precise role of the microenvironment on tumor growth is poorly understood. Whereas the tumor is in constant competition with the surrounding tissue, little is known about the mechanics of this interaction. Using a novel experimental procedure, we study quantitatively the effect of an applied mechanical stress on the long-term growth of a spheroid cell aggregate. We observe that a stress of 10 kPa is sufficient to drastically reduce growth by inhibition of cell proliferation mainly in the core of the spheroid. We compare the results to a simple numerical model developed to describe the role of mechanics in cancer progression.