Shilpa Sant
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Breast cancer becomes deadly mainly when it returns or spreads to other organs, and no current treatment reliably eliminates this spread (metastasis). Preventing it early means understanding how the tissue around a tumor, called the tumor microenvironment, pushes cancer cells toward spreading.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Materials Science
- Topics
breast cancer
BrCa
microcalcifications
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Test whether malignant calcium phosphate (hydroxyapatite) microcalcifications promote breast tumor growth and bone-like traits through Na-Pi transporter signaling, using engineered ECM-mimic hydrogels carrying defined mineral types.
- Compare how benign calcium oxalate and malignant calcium phosphate microcalcifications embedded in soft breast-like hydrogels influence the behavior of breast cancer cells.
- Test whether breast cancer cells that interact with malignant microcalcifications gain bone mimicry that drives breast-to-bone metastasis, using ex vivo tissue and cell line- and patient-derived xenograft (CDX, PDX) models.
- Validate the hydrogel and xenograft findings in patient breast cancer samples with and without microcalcifications, to identify biomarkers that flag high-risk patients.
More about the research
One feature of that environment is microcalcifications (MCs). These are tiny insoluble calcium deposits that show up on mammograms and help detect over half of breast cancers too small to feel, and 70-90% of pre-invasive cases. Calcium oxalate deposits are seen in benign breast conditions, while calcium phosphate (hydroxyapatite) deposits are mainly linked to cancer. Whether this chemical difference actually changes how a tumor behaves has gone largely untested, because there have been no good laboratory models of mineralized breast tissue.
Why it matters
Mammographic microcalcifications are already used to detect breast cancer. Learning how their chemistry affects tumor growth and spread to bone could turn them into markers for identifying patients at higher risk of metastasis. The work could also inform local treatments meant to block this process, such as bisphosphonates, denosumab or phosphate transporter inhibitors, for patients with calcification-positive breast cancer.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shreyas Rao
University of Alabama, AL·Biomedical Engineering
Engineer a 3D model of brain metastatic breast cancer by growing tumor cells, human microglia and macrophages as spheroids in a hyaluronic acid hydrogel, at clinically relevant cell ratios.
Jennifer Koblinski
Virginia Commonwealth University, VA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Develop more than 500 new patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models, patient tumors grown in mice, from the patient populations served by the cancer center.
Jing Yang
University of California-San Diego, CA·Biochemistry
Determine how the Hippo pathway, through the LATS1/2 kinases, controls transcription of ESR1, the main estrogen receptor gene, in breast cells and what ESR1 contributes to Hippo biology in breast tissue.
The school
University of Illinois Chicago: 42 labs on PI Pages, $532M a year on research, 359 research doctorates a year.
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