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Breast cancer research has been largely confined to studying transformed cell lines in a dish or implanting cells from established human tumors into mice and other animal models of the disease. Although these models provide some insight into a cancer’s machinations at the cellular level, they fall short when investigating cancer initiation and progression within human tissue.
Researchers at Whitehead Institute have created a hydrogel scaffold replicating the environment found within the human breast. The scaffold supports the growth of human mammary tissue from patient-derived cells and can be used to study normal breast development as well as breast cancer initiation and progression. Ideally, scientists would be able to grow in a dish human mammary glands that mimic the body’s breast tissue, including its response to hormones that trigger development during pregnancy and lactation.Image credit: Daniel Miller and Ethan Sokol, Gupta Lab, Whitehead Institute, MIT
