Prof. Skardal awarded $400,000 NIH grant for colorectal cancer research

Biomedical Engineering Assistant Professor Aleksander Skardal received a $400,000, two-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) R21 grant to support the use of his innovative organoid and metastasis-on-a-chip technologies to understand how colorectal tumors progress.

Colorectal cancer often leads to metastasis in the liver and the ultimate cause of death in the majority of these patients is metastatic disease. The NIH grant supports Skardal's research on "Organoid modeling of pre-metastatic niche formation in the liver by primary colorectal tumor secreted factors." Skardal and his team will use novel bioengineered 3D organoid technologies, paired with a unique metastasis-on-a-chip platform, to quantitatively investigate how colorectal tumors induce pre-metastatic niche formation in the liver, which subsequently impacts the likelihood of metastasis.

This research is part of a strong collaboration between the Department of Biomedical Engineering and The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute. Collaborators on this project include Dr. Allan Tsung from the Department of Surgery at the University of Virginia, and Dr. Alex Kim, from the Division of Surgical Oncology at The Ohio State University.