BME PhD Preliminary Exam Announcement for Ellen Frahm (C. Lin, advisor) Everyone is invited to attend the public presentation beginning at 1:00 PM. Title: Dynamic granular hydrogels as a therapeutic testing platform to assess pancreatic cancer cell fate Date: July 29th, 2025 Time: 1:00 PM Location: SL220A and Teams Teams meeting link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_MjgwOGZjZWMtMDRkMC00M... Meeting ID: 226 217 781 643 Passcode: Et6uF78r Committee members: Dr. Chien-Chi Lin (chair), Dr. Sherry Harbin, Dr. Taimoor Qazi, Dr. Hiroki Yokota Abstract: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is characterized by stiffened pancreatic tissue and compressed vasculature. Replicating the tissue stiffening is of great interest with disease modeling, which has been accomplished with bulk hydrogels of tunable stiffness. However, excessively stiff hydrogels impede migration, while overly compliant hydrogels degrade with cellular invasion. Thus, bulk hydrogels are not reliable drug testing platforms for chemotherapeutics. Newer approaches use granular hydrogel scaffolds, which are made of packed hydrogel granules that create void spaces for facilitated cell migration. These approaches to granular hydrogel scaffold formation have not used dynamic stiffness tuning. This proposal explores the capacity to which granular hydrogel scaffolds can be better connected between PDAC progression and drug testing. This work uses gelatin-norbornene-carbohydrazide, a polymer that allows several click chemistries for scaffold formation. Notably, hydrazone bonding stiffens the entire scaffold, which replicates disease progressive stiffening. Initial work with this scaffold demonstrates that cancer associated fibroblasts (CAFs) readily migrate through the scaffold. This system will be adapted to include primary cancer cells with CAFs as a drug screening platform to inhibit migration. A vascular mimetic system will be added to the scaffold as an interstitial matrix. It is expected that scaffold stiffening and cancer cell migration will compress the vasculature. This work will verify the behavior of drugs for PDAC treatment towards cancerous and vascular cells. Eventually, this system could be used to screen novel drugs before in vivo testing. This is significant as the modeling technique from this work will be more biologically relevant for drug testing. -- Bmeroundtable-list mailing list Bmeroundtable-list@ecn.purdue.edu https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECN/mailman/listinfo/bmeroundtable-list