Elastographic Assessment of Xenograft Pancreatic Tumors

High tissue pressures prevent chemotherapeutics from reaching the parenchyma of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, which makes it difficult to treat this aggressive disease. Researchers currently use invasive probes to monitor the effectiveness of pressure-reducing therapies, but this practice introduces additional complications. Here, we hypothesize that Young's modulus is a good surrogate for tissue pressure because collagen density and hyaluoronic acid, the key features of the tumor microenvironment responsible for high tissue pressures, also affect modulus elastograms. To corroborate this hypothesis, we used model-based quasi-static elastography to assess how the Young's modulus of naturally occurring AsPc-1 pancreatic tumors varies with collagen density and hyaluoronic acid concentration. We observed that Young's moduli of orthotopically grown xenograft tumors were 6 kPa (p < 0.05) higher than that of their subcutaneously grown counterparts. We also observed a strong correlation between Young's modulus and regions within the tumors with high collagen (R² ≈ 0.8) and hyaluoronic acid (R² ≈ 0.6) densities. These preliminary results indicate that hyaluronic acid and collagen density, features of the pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tumor microenvironment responsible for high tissue pressure, influence Young's modulus.