On the Impacts of Flow on the Migration and Growth of Cancer Cells

Abstract Our study aims to identify the role of fluid flow in the growth of human bone cancer cells during metastasis. In our experiments, the cancer cells are seeded on the surface of cylindrical scaffolds in a bioreactor. The flow is laminar flow, which mimics the physiological conditions of the human body. A full-scale 3D high-resolution computational mesh of scaffold was created based on the physical scaffold's Micro-CT scans using open-source imaging software Slicer3D and Meshmixer. To investigate the influences of the flow on the seeded cells, we performed Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations with the immersed boundary method (Gilmanov, Le, Sotiropoulos, JCP 300, 1, 2015). The computational domain was generated using the commercial software Gridgen. Our results show that the fluid flow velocity is highly dependent on the shape and pore sizes. In addition, the magnitude of the velocity on the surface where the cells are seeded is in between [0-0.05] μm/sallowing the cells to grow without being detached from the surface of the scaffold. Our future work will focus on (i) investigating the role of the shear stress on the distribution and orientation of the cancer cells. (ii) Simulating multiple scaffolds within the bioreactor to further quantify the impact of the gap on the flow velocity and shear.