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

Understanding cancer initiation and progression is extremely challenging, in part due to experimental limitations in measuring and interpreting key signalling and tumour-microenvironment (TME) interactions that determine changes in cell and tissue behaviours over time. Here we developed SITE (Serial Imaging of Tumour and microEnvironment), a spatially-and temporally integrated, modular, ex vivo platform enabling quantitative analysis of TME interaction dynamics, signalling, and cell fate at single cell and tissue scales. Applied to modelling primary and lung metastatic breast cancer, SITE revealed tissue-specific TME interactions and ERK signalling patterns linked to distinct single-cell behaviours. We found that the earliest steps in tumour establishment and metastatic seeding involved active cell protrusion and the establishment of a multicellular niche interfacing tumour and host. Experimental and mathematical modelling showed that ERK signalling was co-influenced by these interactions, where cancer cluster formation increased signalling via the establishment of local signalling circuits. Disruption of these signalling circuits led to tissue-specific impacts on cancer intrinsic and TME interaction dynamics. Here, we modelled breast cancer as a test case, demonstrating the broad utility of SITE for quantitative exploration of TME interaction dynamics‒ closing a significant gap in experimental capabilities between in vivo models and in vitro systems.