Grace Cai

1 Introduction Cancer remains the second most common cause of death in the United States, behind heart disease (Xu et al. 2021). This is due, in part, to the challenges associated with treating metastatic cancers, which account for 90% of all cancer-related deaths (Steeg 2016; Kumari et al. 2023; Welch and Hurst 2019).

Abstract Astronauts experience significant and rapid bone loss as a result of an extended stay in space, making the International Space Station (ISS) the perfect laboratory for studying osteoporosis due to the accelerated nature of bone loss on the ISS. This prompts the question, how does the lack of load due to zero-gravity propagate to bone-forming cells, human fetal osteoblasts (hFOBs), altering their maturation to mineralization?

Abstract While it is known that cells with differential adhesion tend to segregate and preferentially sort, the physical forces governing sorting and invasion in heterogeneous tumors remain poorly understood. To investigate this, we tune matrix confinement, mimicking changes in the stiffness and confinement of the tumor microenvironment, to explore how physical confinement influences individual and collective cell migration in 3D spheroids.