Human chip tracks breast cancer spread to bone and lung

Cancer cells enter a tiny circulation, meet a vessel wall and head toward two engineered destinations: human bone and lung tissue. At Columbia Engineering, Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic’s team built a multi-organ chip that lets researchers watch that journey in the laboratory, using compartments containing millimeter-sized tissues linked by vascular flow.

The challenge is the moment after a cancer cell leaves the original tumor. It must adhere to and cross the endothelium—the inner lining of blood vessels—then survive in a new organ and reshape its surroundings. Metastasis causes at least two-thirds of cancer deaths, while animal models do not always capture the differences between rodent and human biology that can affect drug performance.

The Columbia device separates the engineered tissues from the vascular channel with a selectively permeable endothelial barrier, while allowing the compartments to communicate through circulation. Bone, lung and vascular tissues were engineered from induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, and maintained in compartments designed for tissue maturation and long-term function. The researchers introduced circulating human breast cancer cells and compared where different cancer-cell types settled.

The patterns matched organ preference. Cells that typically gravitate toward bone showed stronger bone colonization and caused more pronounced bone degeneration. Cells that typically gravitate toward the lung disrupted lung tissue more strongly and produced only modest colonization of bone. The team also found signs of pre-metastatic niche formation: cancer cells conditioned both distant tissues to become more receptive before they colonized them.

And concretely? For cancer researchers, the chip offers a controlled human-tissue setting to study organ-specific spread, molecular pathways and possible therapeutic targets, including with patient cells and tissues. It is a research platform in the laboratory, not a treatment; its role is to complement animal models.