1/7/2026 Hailee Munno
Illinois bioengineering professor Susan Leggett helping lead a collaborative effort to better understand how ovarian cancer spreads by engineering a 3D peritoneal cavity-on-a-chip that replicates the fluid-filled environment where metastasis occurs. Developed with clinicians at the Siteman Cancer Center, the bioengineered model enables real-time, live-cell imaging of cancer cells as they migrate, survive, and colonize new tissues. By integrating patient-derived tumor and fluid samples, the platform supports high-throughput studies and personalized testing of treatment responses. This work highlights the power of bioengineering to bridge advanced modeling, clinical insight, and translational cancer research.
Written by Hailee Munno
Ovarian cancer poses a unique challenge for clinicians when trying to observe cancer cells’ behavior due to a process known as transcoelomic spread. This process is the shedding of cancer cells from a primary tumor into a fluid-filled body cavity, known as the peritoneal cavity. These cells can circulate through fluid spaces and attach to healthy tissue to establish new metastatic tumors at distant sites. Transcoelomic spread is not easily modeled with current methods, which has severely limited research and development of therapies for patients with ovarian cancer.
Working to address these issues are Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) member Susan Leggett, assistant professor of bioengineering, and Siteman Cancer Center member Dr. Maggie Mullen, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Washington University medical school. Through a CCIL and Siteman Cancer center collaboration, the researchers have developed a new 3D culture model that recreates the environment of the peritoneal cavity to more closely study how ovarian cancer spreads in the body.
“Our team is developing a miniaturized organ system, a peritoneal cavity-on-a-chip, to study how ovarian cancer cells spread through fluid spaces in the abdomen to invade and colonize foreign tissues,” Leggett said. “Very little is known about this process because of the challenge of in vivo observation and the lack of culture models that reconstruct in vivo anatomy.”
To support this project, the CCIL and Siteman Cancer Center each provided funding. The Siteman Investment Program RDA provides seed funding to faculty investigators with innovative cancer research ideas to generate data for future external grants.
“The goal of this collaborative relationship is to develop a high-throughput scalable model for us to study ovarian cancer behavior and then include human-derived patient materials and test the ability of this model to predict response to therapy.” -Dr. Timothy Fan, CCIL Associate Director for Translational Research
“The one-year award from the CCIL and Siteman allowed us to engineer and optimize our peritoneal cavity-on-a-chip system by providing necessary materials and graduate research assistant support,” Leggett said. “The support also allowed us to obtain samples from ovarian cancer patients to integrate into our engineered model, including fifteen patient solid ovarian tumor samples and fifteen patient peritoneal fluid samples.”
This project used a microscopy technique called live-cell imaging which allows researchers to observe the behavior of living cells “in action” in a controlled environment. Traditional imaging of fixed samples fails to capture these dynamic behaviors.
“Integration of our tool with live-cell imaging addresses this longstanding challenge by providing a unique window through which we can observe the dynamics of ovarian cancer spread in real time within a physiologically relevant three-dimensional environment,” Leggett said. “By incorporating patient samples into the model, we can screen how individual ovarian cancer patients may respond to different treatment approaches, serving as a platform for personalized medicine.”
What makes ovarian cancer particularly difficult to treat is that most patients are diagnosed after the disease has already started spreading. By the time symptoms appear, cells have most likely already traveled to other parts of the body via the peritoneal cavity.
“Ovarian cancer is most commonly diagnosed at stage three or four, at which point most patients present with malignant ascites, where ovarian tumor cells can be detected in peritoneal fluid, and present with peritoneal metastasis,” Leggett said. “To improve patient outcomes, it is critical to develop a better understanding of how ovarian cancer cells shed into the peritoneal cavity, survive in peritoneal fluid, and subsequently seed metastases.”
Dr. Timothy Fan, Associate Director for Translational Research at the CCIL, believes that pairing expertise in these highly advanced cancer models with clinical practice allows researchers to make ground-breaking advances in personalized cancer therapies.
“The goal of this collaborative relationship is to develop a high-throughput scalable model for us to study ovarian cancer behavior and then include human-derived patient materials and test the ability of this model to predict response to therapy,” Fan said.
This project aims to generate a pipeline for the generation of patient-specific engineered models by placing a patient’s cancer cells into the chip and to test treatment strategies tailored specifically to that individual.
“By prioritizing physiological relevance, platform accessibility, and scalability, this approach provides a realistic path toward clinical translation that could ultimately support predictive, personalized medicine for ovarian cancer patients,” Leggett said.
Fan believes the project is not only scientifically important but also is a large step towards CCIL’s goal to be a cross-institutional hub for innovation.
“We started initially with these three collaborative projects,” Fan said. “But the goal is to actually continue to build stronger and more impactful relationships with Siteman Cancer Center.”
Read more stories featuring the CCIL’s collaboration with the Siteman Cancer Center: “Researchers Collaborate to Improve Conventional Cancer Targeting Strategies” and “Veterinary Medicine Research Collaboration Aims to Reduce Radiation Threat to Healthy Soft Tissue.”