On the evaluation of long term ex vivo cultivation of pancreatic cancer in a 3D scaffolding system

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of all cancer-related deaths in the United States, fifth in the UK and eighth worldwide. It is a highly lethal disease (the 5-year survival rate is only 6%) with poor prognosis. Additionally, while the mortality of other types of cancers is declined, pancreatic cancer’s mortality is stable, showing limited progress on the development of efficient treatments. In vitro pancreatic cancer research up to date is mainly conducted in traditional 2D monolayer culturing systems that are far from being an accurate representative of the in vivo tumor microenvironment. Thus, in order to understand in depth the cell and tumor behavior and consequently, the response to treatment, it is crucial to mimic as close as possible ex vivo the in vivo tumor environment. The latter, is the main aim of our highly porous scaffolds1 . These scaffolds aim to recapitulate the in vivo microenvironment in terms of structure, porosity and presence of microenvironmental niches. Their spatial arrangement provides better cell-cell interactions while coating with different extracellular matrix proteins (ECM) reassures more realistic cell-matrix interactions. The overall aim of this work is to evaluate the evolution (growth) of different pancreatic cell lines in highly porous polymeric scaffolds in presence of different extracellular matrix systems, i.e., different protein coatings