2025/10/22 | People | In-vitro & Organs-on-Chip

PhD Defense: Karin Schmid-Rechberger Reproduces Tumor Behavior on Microvasculature Chip

On October 22, 2025, Karin Schmid-Rechberger successfully defended her PhD thesis: “Towards a Metastatic Vascularized Tumor-on-Chip.”

In this thesis, Karin addressed the substantial clinical challenges of lung cancer through the development and application of a vascularized cancer-on-chip system to closely recapitulate key steps of the metastatic cascade by recreating the tumor microenvironment (TME).

With this novel open-top microfluidic platform, Karin investigated the tumor-vasculature interactions, examined the extravasation behavior of circulating tumor cells—whether the cancer cells exit the capillaries and enter other tissues—and assessed the effects of chemotherapeutic drug toxicity on the vascular network, an essential aspect in current clinical oncology.

Karin showed that this microvasculature-on-chip system is capable of successfully mimicking the TME in a reproducible manner, underscoring the importance of such cancer-on-chip systems in enabling real-time observation, prediction of cancer cell behavior during the extravasation stage of metastasis, and offering a tool for reliable chemotherapeutic drug testing.

Extravasation dynamics of two subpopulations of A549 cancer cells in a µVN-on-chip. Figure from Schmid et al. (2024). ©Karin Schmid-Rechberger

 

Congratulations to Dr. Karin Schmid-Rechberger on this incredible achievement and contribution to a better understanding of cancer cell mechanistic in a vascularized microenvironment!

Publications:

Schmid, Karin F.; Zeinali, Soheila; Moser, Susanne K.; Dubey, Cristelle; Schneider, Sabine; Deng, Haibin; Häfliger, Simon; Marti, Thomas M.; Guenat, Olivier T. (2024). Assessing the metastatic potential of circulating tumor cells using an organ-on-chip model. Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology 12:1457884. Frontiers Media 10.3389/fbioe.2024.1457884

Zamprogno, Pauline; Schulte, Jan; Ferrari, Dario; Rechberger, Karin; Sengupta, Arunima; van Os, Lisette; Weber, Tobias; Zeinali, Soheila; Geiser, Thomas; Guenat, Olivier T. (2023). Lung-on-a-Chip Models of the Lung Parenchyma. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology Vol. 1413, pp. 191-211. Springer 10.1007/978-3-031-2665-6_10

Zeinali, Soheila; Rechberger, Karin; Dubey, Christelle; Gashi, Rrahim; Marti, Thomas; Dorn, Patrick; Guenat, Olivier T. (2022). Metastasis-on-chip: 3D human microvasculature network to study extravasation dynamics of lung cancer in vitro. Annals of Oncology 33:2(S92). Elsevier 10.1016/j.annonc.2022.02.159

Patent:

Guenat, Olivier T.; Zeinali, Soheila; Gashi, Rrahim; Rechberger, Karin F. (2022). Microfluidic Cell Culturing Device. (Patent No. WO-2023073178-A1)