Establishment of 3D-cell culture and co-culture models of prostate cancer for biotechnological drug development
Project no. 27410 · Status: Kapanmış (Yayın bekleniyor) · 2023
Summary
<p>Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer among men (Sung ve diğerleri, 2021). While anti-androgen therapy is used in the early stages of prostate cancer, there are insufficient treatment options for metastatic and castration-resistant prostate cancer, and there is a need for research to develop effective anticancer drugs. In vitro cell culture is frequently used to elucidate the mechanisms of prostate cancer development and in anticancer drug research. While cell culture is rapid, practical, and inexpensive, it may not adequately reflect in vivo conditions. Today, 3-dimensional spheroid models are being developed in many cancer studies. It is known that 3-dimensional culture provides better results than 2-dimensional culture in representing cell-cell interactions in cancer, as well as interactions of tumor cells with different cells through co-culture studies. Therefore, developing tumor-stroma co-culture models and 3-dimensional tumor spheroid models to represent the in vivo conditions of cancer is a necessary method for understanding the molecular mechanisms of prostate cancer and testing anticancer drug candidates. In this project, to investigate cancer mechanisms and analyze the efficacy of biotechnological drug candidates more accurately, it is aimed to establish, optimize, and validate the use of 3-dimensional prostate cancer spheroid models and tumor-stroma co-culture models for the analysis of the efficacy of nucleic acid-based drugs. For this purpose, a 3-dimensional prostate spheroid model and an epithelial-fibroblast co-culture model representing tumor-stroma interaction will be established, and parameters such as spheroid size and cell number will be optimized. The use of the models for testing the cellular uptake of nucleic acid-based drug candidate molecules in biotechnological drug research has been validated. Additionally, by establishing a co-culture model representing tumor-stroma interaction, it has been possible to model the stromal effects on tumor cells in the testing of drug efficacy. With the results obtained, it is possible to contribute to the use of cancer models that represent the tumor microenvironment more successfully in prostate cancer studies and thus to test biotechnological drug candidates more efficiently and realistically in in vitro cell culture. This study was supported by Ege University Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit (Project no: 27410).</p>