Serial Imaging of Tumor and microEnvironment (SITE) platform for live-cell ex vivo modeling of primary and metastatic cancer dynamics

Understanding cancer onset and progression is extremely challenging, in part due to experimental limitations in measuring and interpreting key signaling and tumor-host interactions that determine cancer behavior over time, across cell and tissue scales. Here we developed SITE (Serial Imaging of Tumor and microEnvironment), a spatially and temporally integrated platform combining ex vivo culture, biosensors, live imaging, and computation. Applied to modeling primary and lung metastatic breast cancer, SITE revealed tissue-specific tumor–host interactions and ERK signaling patterns linked to distinct single-cell behaviors. We found that multicellular niche formation involved active protrusion and cell–cell contact driven by both cancer and host cells. Mathematical modeling showed ERK signaling was co-influenced by neighboring cancer and host cells. Paracrine signaling among cancer cells increased signaling in a cluster-size–dependent manner, while disruption of cancer–cancer signaling loops amplified tissue-specific differences in tumor architecture. Applied specifically to breast cancer, we demonstrated the utility of the SITE platform, enabling quantitative exploration of ex vivo signaling and tumor-host interaction dynamics.