A U.S.-Korea international research team has developed a microengineering platform that precisely recreates the in vivo environment of human solid tumors on a three-dimensional chip and can predict treatment efficacy.
The National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) said on the 27th that Professor Kang Tae-uk of Sogang University and Professor Heo Dong-eun of the University of Pennsylvania, researchers at the Sogang-UPenn Convergence Research Center for Emerging Infectious Disease Theranostics established through international joint research by Sogang University and the University of Pennsylvania, developed a platform that microengineers and vascularizes human solid tumor tissue to model CAR-T cell therapy ex vivo.
CAR-T cell therapy is an immuno-oncology treatment that extracts a patient's immune cells (T cells), genetically engineers them to attack cancer cells, and reinfuses them into the patient's body. To date, it has been applied only in a limited way to blood cancers, and in the case of solid tumors, predicting treatment efficacy has been difficult due to the complex microenvironment within the tumor tissue and limits to immune cell infiltration. In particular, another limitation has been that existing animal models or two-dimensional cell culture systems cannot reproduce the complex responses of solid tumors.
To overcome these limitations, the joint research team developed a "3D tumor microenvironment chip" designed to simulate the tumor tissue of actual patients. The platform precisely recreated the microvascular structure within tumor tissue, the complex interactions among cancer cells and surrounding immune cells and stromal cells, and the oxygen concentration and biochemical environment within the tissue.
Through this, the entire process by which CAR-T cells approach and attack cancer cells within solid tumors could be observed and analyzed in real time. By integrating advanced live imaging with artificial intelligence (AI)-based big data analysis technology, the team succeeded in finely tracking the migration, binding, attack, and death phases of CAR-T cells.
The researchers confirmed a high correlation between the CAR-T cell mechanisms observed with this platform and actual patient clinical responses, greatly improving predictive power for clinical trials and new drug development.
Professor Kang Tae-uk said, "We expect this microengineering platform, which predicts the efficacy of CAR-T therapy for solid tumors, to present a new turning point for research on various immuno-oncology drugs," and added, "We will advance it in connection with future clinical research to more precisely recreate in vivo responses."
The results of this study were published in the international journal in the life sciences and chemistry fields "Nature Biotechnology" on Oct. 17 (local time).
References
Nature Biotechnology (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-025-02845-z