The development of tumour vascular networks
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Date
2021
Authors
Fouladzadeh, A.
Dorraki, M.
Min, K.K.M.
Cockshell, M.P.
Thompson, E.J.
Verjans, J.W.
Allison, A.
Bonder, C.S.
Abbott, D.
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Journal article
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Communications Biology, 2021; 4(1):1111-1-1111-10
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Anahita Fouladzadeh, Mohsen Dorraki, Kay Khine Myo Min, Michaelia P. Cockshell, Emma J. Thompson, Johan W. Verjans, Andrew Allison, Claudine S. Bonder and Derek Abbott
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Abstract
The growth of solid tumours relies on an ever-increasing supply of oxygen and nutrients that are delivered via vascular networks. Tumour vasculature includes endothelial cell lined angiogenesis and the less common cancer cell lined vasculogenic mimicry (VM). To study and compare the development of vascular networks formed during angiogenesis and VM (represented here by breast cancer and pancreatic cancer cell lines) a number of in vitro assays were utilised. From live cell imaging, we performed a large-scale automated extraction of network parameters and identified properties not previously reported. We show that for both angiogenesis and VM, the characteristic network path length reduces over time; however, only endothelial cells increase network clustering coefficients thus maintaining smallworld network properties as they develop. When compared to angiogenesis, the VM network efficiency is improved by decreasing the number of edges and vertices, and also by increasing edge length. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that angiogenic and VM networks appear to display similar properties to road traffic networks and are also subject to the well-known Braess paradox. This quantitative measurement framework opens up new avenues to potentially evaluate the impact of anti-cancer drugs and anti-vascular therapies.
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Data source: Supplementary information, https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02632-x
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© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.