Q | Write a brief introduction to yourself including the lab you work in and your research background.
My name is Sarah Libring and I am a biomedical engineer working under Cynthia Reinhart-King at Rice University. I am studying breast cancer metastasis and the ability of different breast cancer cells to condition fibroblasts at distant organs to support metastatic tumor growth. Our research goal is to understand mechanobiology in the metastatic cascade and reduce the burden of metastatic disease.
Q | How did you first get interested in science and/or your field of research?
In high school, I was part of Project Lead the Way Pathway to Engineering, which piqued my interest in engineering. Through podcasts and TED talks around the same time, I learned about tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. I loved the combination of biology and engineering and the translational aspects, so I pursued biomedical engineering in college, where one of my first research projects was working on scaffolds for ligament regeneration. I gained experience with breast cancer and the complex dynamics of tissue mechanics and biological cell responses. I have continued to dig deeper into matrix organization alterations, fibroblast activation given that they are key matrix organizing cells, and cancer cell-fibroblast interactions throughout my graduate and postdoctoral studies.
Q | Tell us about your favorite research project you’re working on.
In graduate school, I helped lead the development of an actuating platform to cyclically stretch cells cultured within 3D fibronectin matrices. We tuned the amplitude and frequency of the stretching to mimic lung tissue mechanics during breathing. Most mechanobiology studies focus on substrate stiffness, and some explore compressive forces. But it can be more difficult to implement tensile forces, especially while still wanting to use a native matrix protein for the culture platform. Using magnetic actuation and a cell-free rotational fibronectin coating technique, we had the tools and expertise to put all these components together into a platform where multiple devices could actuate in parallel, allowing us to efficiently test the response of lung fibroblasts and three different breast cancer cell lines of varied phenotypes to the mechanical load. We were surprised to find that cyclic mechanical force often resulted in less Yes-associated protein (YAP) activation, which is a fundamental marker for mechanotransduction. However, YAP is also tied to proliferation, and cyclic stretching seems to inhibit proliferation for many cancer cells. We have a lot more to explore on how cancer cells that disseminate to the lungs overcome mechanical forces they’ve never experienced before.
Q | What do you find most exciting about your research project?
A career in science has taken me around the world in ways that I didn’t expect when I first fell in love with academic research as an undergraduate. I was awarded an IIE GIRE fellowship that allowed me to spend several months in Amsterdam at the Netherlands Cancer Institute working with pleural effusion samples from patients with metastatic breast cancer. I have traveled to 14 states to present posters and talks at conferences so far, and I was able to present at a conference in London hosted by CRUK-AACR during graduate school. I have researched in seven labs across four states so far, having just passed the decade mark since I started my first undergraduate research project. I can’t wait to see where the next decade takes me.
Q | If you could be a laboratory instrument, which one would you be and why?
I would have to be a confocal microscope. So much of our work in a good paper involves validating findings using multiple assay techniques and multiple biological controls. But “seeing is believing” and those beautiful representative images are what we pick first to highlight anytime we give a presentation (of course, with the quantitative graph right behind it!). Plus, I think it is amazing that such a fundamental workhorse technique is also continuing to make so many advancements every couple of years. We are pushing the spatiotemporal limits of capturing light itself and using the properties of light to reveal other characteristics of our samples, like determining mechanics with Brillouin microscopy and chemical composition with Raman spectroscopy.
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