Engineering hydrogel based cancer microenvironments for in vitro breast cancer cell culture and therapeutics screening

Statement of Purpose: Breast cancer cell of different invasiveness have been shown different morphologies and phenotypes when cultured inside various hydrogels^{1, 2}. The commonly used 3D culture material-Matrigel suffers from issues such as batch to batch variation, complicated components and difficulty in stromal cell support. Type I collagen has offered an alternative to Matrigel for breast tumor culture, however, the morphology of breast cancer cells cultured in collagen is quite different from those in Matrigel. To solve such problem and better mimic the breast cancer microenvironment, we developed a novel collagen based hydrogel by mixing hyaluronic acid-poly (N-isopropylacrylamide) (HA-NIPAM) into collagen and evaluated the application of such hydrogel as a cancer microenvironment for in vitro breast cancer cell culture.