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Researchers from the University of Toronto have created a new multi-organ-on-a-chip device to investigate why the heart is one of the least common sites of cancer metastasis, creating new opportunities for cancer research and drug discovery.

The heart's unusual resistance to cancer has long puzzled scientists and may contain important clues for preventing metastasis in other organs. The new multi-organ-on-a-chip platform makes it possible to study this phenomenon in a controlled laboratory setting. Using the platform, the team found that aggressive breast cancer cells readily invaded engineered liver tissue but showed significantly reduced invasion into cardiac tissue.

The platform, called the Multi-organ Invasion Device (MInD), connects multiple engineered tissues within a single system under dynamic fluid flow. It allows researchers to observe how cancer cells move between tissue environments and how each organ influences their behavior. The research team published their findings in Nature Communications.

"The goal was to create a platform that captures key steps of the metastatic process while allowing us to observe interactions between different tissues under controlled conditions," says professor Milica Radisic, the senior author of the study.

"Current models have important limitations, either because they cannot reproduce the complexity of human tissues or because they do not have a good way to connect organ compartments via a common circulation. MInD provides a new way to investigate these interactions."

Metastasis is responsible for more than 90% of cancer-related deaths, but the biological processes that determine where tumor cells spread remain difficult to study.

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