Engineering Faster Tumor Readouts
Tran Nguyen, Ph.D., knew her future would wind along a scientific path, but the direction that path would lead her was not always clear.
“My trajectory was not always clear,” Dr. Nguyen said. “I think it’s really been shaped by a lot of people along the way – a lot of my mentors and a lot of opportunity during my undergrad actually paved the way for what I am doing right now.”
Originally from Vietnam, she was raised looking up to her father who is a doctor and thought she might follow in his footsteps and earn a medical degree. When she arrived in the United States to begin her college studies, however, she found herself traveling a different path in the scientific field.
In 2013, Dr. Nguyen graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemical biology from the University of California – Berkley.
“I was more like a biochemist in training for my undergrad,” she said. “I got an opportunity to do research in a physics lab, but it was more about using nanomaterials for biosensors. That is where things started to mold into shape.”
Dr. Nguyen began intensive research related to biosensors. The research and experience she gained led her to pursue a doctorate degree in biomedical engineering, which she earned from the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University in 2020.
After completing her doctorate, Dr. Nguyen then took a position as a postdoctoral fellow in the Albert Folch Lab at the University of Washington. In the Folch Lab, she worked on a biosensor that tested microdissection tumor samples and their response to multiple drug treatments for cancer. The method uses sensors with special molecules called aptamers to detect cytochrome C, a signal that detects when cells are dying, directly from the tumor sample. The sensors are then able to monitor tumor responses to drug therapy in real time.
“The problem is that usually some of the methods to measure how the tumor responds to the drug you have to wait until two to three days after you finish the experiment,” Dr. Nguyen said. “We don’t know anything during the process of the drug treatment. For example, 12 or 24 hours in, we don’t have any information.”
She proposed to Dr. Folch that they integrate the electrochemical biosensor she had worked on during her graduate program to attempt to achieve real-time measurements of tumor response to the drug treatment.
“Now, we should be able to measure the drug response of the tumor during the process of treatment,” Dr. Nguyen said. “The tumor might respond really well at four hours, for example, but some drugs might not respond at all, based on our measurements. At the end, we were hoping we would have a more reliable prediction of drug efficacy in human patients.”
While the biosensor was her expertise and her primary research project during her postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Nguyen also had an opportunity to further explore cancer biology. The lab realized there was a secondary issue with the tumors they were testing – the vascular structure disappeared quickly. To circumvent this issue, Dr. Nguyen developed a microfluidic device that sustained the natural microvasculature of the tumor after explant.
“I developed a microfluidic platform so we could continuously perfuse the microtumor to preserve and modulate the tumor vasculature,” she said. “Through this approach, I investigated the effects of drugs on vascular modulators and determine their response to microvasculature and tumor drug sensitivity.”
Dr. Nguyen’s proposal opened a new line of research in the Folch Lab and led to an R01 grant from the National Cancer Institute. She was also awarded the Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Training Grant in Cancer Research to support her work.
“We hope these new models, and the new study, can pave the way so we can have a more dynamic and precise cancer modeling platform that better mimics the tumor microenvironment inside the patient,” she said.
It is the expertise in electrochemical biosensors that Dr. Nguyen hopes to build in her new role as Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UT Southwestern.
“UT Southwestern has a great interdisciplinary environment,” she said. “I want to work on new approaches that combine biosensors, microfluidic devices and advanced tissue models to create new tools that can personalize cancer care and improve the early detection of breast cancer. The Department of Breast Surgical Oncology as well as the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center are really great opportunities for me to collaborate with clinicians.”