Measuring how cancer drugs affect blood vessels grown in a dish.

This is probably one of my favorite images from the lab because it reminds me of one of my favorite paintings, Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. This image is my rendition of that, but here, the “stars” are teeny blood vessel cells that are sprouting from a ball of cells.

This beautiful image was taken from one of my recent experiments in which I was trying to measure how a new type of cancer drug affects blood vessels. Maybe you are wondering, why is it important to measure how cancer drugs affect blood vessels? Well, believe it or not, tumors create their own supply of blood vessels to get oxygen and nutrients for growth! So by studying how cancer drugs affect blood vessel growth, we can understand how a drug might increase or decrease the growth of tumors in the body.

To study blood vessel grown in a dish, I place balls of endothelial cells (or the cells that make up the blood vessels) into a gel and add some growth factors. After some time, the endothelial cells begin to move outward from the ball, creating small “blood vessels”. The most amazing thing is that endothelial cells are programmed (in their DNA) to do this automatically, given the right conditions!

The results of this experiment are still being analyzed, so stay tuned! ;)