Technology continues to play a key role in the development and discovery of potential new drugs, helping to provide patients with better treatment options and increasing survival rates for countless diseases across the globe.

A group of researchers from the Tissue Engingeering Microtechnologies lab at the University of Akron are capitalising on emerging tech to discover more effective cancer treatments.

Dr Hossein Tavana is leading the research, which is being funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The researchers have already developed and patented a method to create 3D cultures of clustered cancer cells, called spheroids. These are better at mimicking tumours in the body than the 2D cultures that are traditionally used, with a thin layer of cells being treated on a flat, plastic dish in the lab. The hope is that this will result in more accurate drug testing.

Dr Tavana, an associate professor of biomedical engineering in the university's College of Engineering, received a grant from NIH in 2013. The team is now using a new, three-year grant from the NIH's National Cancer Institute (NCI) worth USD467,312 in order to model the response of colon cancer cells to anticancer drugs.

Dr Tavana explained: "Understanding how cancer cells are able – as often happens – to resist those drugs is a major step toward improving treatments."

In healthy tissues, cell growth is a highly regulated process, however, this is deregulated in cancer cells, which enables continuous growth and results in the formation of tumours. Growth is driven by signalling though several signalling pathways. If these pathways can be identified, then there is the potential for attractive new targets for treatment with specific molecular inhibitors with far less toxicity than conventional chemotherapy drugs.

But Dr Tavana warned: "Studies by our group and others have shown that cancer cells can develop resistance to the inhibitor drugs by activating an alternative signalling pathway to facilitate their growth."

This means that patients become non-responsive to the cancer drug. Recent trials included using two inhibitors simultaneously to block the activity of two pathways but too much toxicity was generated and the clinical trials had to stop.

It is hoped that the new NIH grant will help to address this critical need of identifying molecular mechanisms of drug resistance of the colon cancer cells and shine a light on new treatment strategies that could be developed to effectively block tumour growth with reduced toxic effects on patients.

Pradip Shahi Thakuri, a PhD student working in the lab, commented: "Cancer patients receive treatments in multiple phases. But cancer is an adaptive disease. Patients respond well to the cancer treatments during the initial phase of treatment but often develop resistance to the same drugs later on."

It is because of this that the research team has developed a model to predict the evolution of such resistance. The model mimics how patients receive chemotherapy by cyclically treating the tumour models with cancer drugs and then providing them with time to recover from the drug, the University of Akron explained.

"By using molecular analyses, we will explore specific mechanism that cells use to adapt to and resist the treatment. Then we will use this information to design treatments that effectively eliminate cancer cells with significantly reduced toxicity to normal cells," Dr Tavana said.

Patient-derived colon cancer cells will be used by the researchers through their collaboration with Georgetown University. This will enable them to demonstrate the clinical relevance of their methodology in personalising cancer medicine.

Dr Tavana concluded: "We believe that this drug resistance model using our tumour spheroid technology will be a major step towards predicting, identifying, and designing treatment strategies to control colon cancer."