The Department of Chemical Engineering is pleased to welcome you to hear Professor Eliza Fong discuss her work leveraging biomaterials engineering to build in vitro patient tumors that more closely reflect critical cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions in the tumor microenvironment. She will describe how growing cells in the third dimension influences the cancer cell phenotype and changes drug sensitivity. Her research will improve therapeutic opportunities for cancer patients.
All graduate ChE students will receive an Outlook calendar event with webinar access details.
Everyone is welcome. If you are not a graduate ChE student, contact the Manager of Graduate Studies for the access information you need to join the webinar.
Abstract
Cancer patients deserve to be given more certainty that their treatment will be effective for their unique cancer rather than receiving treatment based on cohort response for their cancer type. Current tumor models used to mimic patient tumors in vitro for drug selection is limited by their inability to fully recapitulate the tumor microenvironment which is known to influence tumor drug sensitivity.
Professor Fong’s research focuses on building patient tumors in vitro by leveraging biomaterials engineering to more closely reflect critical cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions in the tumor microenvironment. In this talk, she will describe how growing cells in the third dimension influences the cancer cell phenotype and changes drug sensitivity towards one that better mimics that in vivo.
She will also show how biomaterials with the appropriate mechanical and biochemical properties can support the culture of patient-derived cancer cells as tumor organoids and preserve key molecular characteristics of patient tumors critical for the evaluation of targeted therapies. Investigations are ongoing to develop more compositionally complex patient tumor models for three major cancer types; this will involve identifying the cellular make-up of tumors and using biomaterials engineering strategies to integrate the various patient-derived stromal cell types with cancer cells as reverse- engineered tumors (RETs). These concerted advances in recapitulating the tumor microenvironment pave the way for building more patient-representative tumor models to reduce the uncertainty and open up more therapeutic opportunities for cancer patients.
Biographical Sketch
Eliza Fong is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and The N.1 Institute for Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS). She received her PhD at Rice University in Houston, Texas, while under the NUS-Overseas Graduate Scholarship. While at Rice, she was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow under the prestigious Med-into-Grad program in Translational Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Professor Fong has made key contributions in the field of translational tumor engineering by being one of the first to demonstrate the integration of tumor organoid technologies with biomaterials-based strategies to grow patient-derived xenograft cells in vitro. For her work, she has received several awards, including the Collaborative Shared Prize by the Bioscience Research Collaborative and the NUS-Early Career Award. Her research team focuses on developing in vitro platforms to reverse-engineer patient tumor tissues for personalized drug testing.