Adhesion strengths between cancer cells with different malignancies and endothelial cells measured using atomic force microscopy

Intercellular adhesion strengths of murine breast cancer cells with different malignancies (FP10SC2, highly metastatic and 4T1-LM weakly metastatic) with murine endothelial cells (BMEC) were measured using a cup-attached chip by atomic force microscopy with contact time of the cells between 0 and 60 s. The work required to separate FP10SC2 from a BMEC was larger than that to separate 4T1-LM after short contact times. In addition, cells were greatly elongated at the separation between FP10SC2 and BMEC. From these results, we suggested a model that the adhesion properties of cancer cells measured in this study were representations of detached cancer cells as circulating tumor cells, and highly metastatic cancer cells strongly adhered to endothelial cells with large deformation in floating conditions. These results indicated that our method is useful to study the processes of cancer cell metastasis with respect to intercellular adhesion. (C) 2019 The Japan Society of Applied Physics