When Jane Baude needed a gel to grow breast cells for her PhD research in 2020, the commercial version she'd planned to use was stuck in pandemic-related supply chain delays. Instead of waiting, she and her advisor Ryan Stowers decided to build one from scratch.
What started as a pandemic workaround has turned into something bigger. Baude engineered an algae-based gel that not only mimics the commercial alternative but gives researchers a tool to understand something fundamental about cancer that's often overlooked: the environment matters as much as the genetics.
The neighborhood effect
In your body, cells don't exist in isolation. Breast cells live in a thin mesh of proteins called the basement membrane, which anchors them in place and sends constant signals about how to behave. Most lab studies of these cells use Matrigel, a gel extracted from mouse tumors — useful, but limited. Baude's algae-based alternative is synthetic, controllable, and revealing.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News DetoxBy adjusting the gel's stiffness and biochemical properties, the UC Santa Barbara team discovered something striking: the same cells can behave like healthy tissue in one environment and like invasive cancer in another. "You can put the same cells in different environments and they might behave like normal cells, or they might behave like invasive malignant cells, just by changing the context that they're growing in," Stowers explains.
This challenges how cancer research has traditionally worked. For decades, scientists focused almost entirely on genetic mutations as the driver of tumor growth. But the physical and chemical "neighborhood" where a cell lives shapes its destiny just as powerfully. The gel gives researchers a way to dial those neighborhood conditions up and down, isolating which factors push cells toward cancer and which keep them healthy.
Published in Science Advances, the research shows the gel successfully supports normal mammary gland development while allowing researchers to modify it to study what goes wrong. Baude tested combinations of short peptide sequences and varied how tightly the gel's polymer chains were linked until she found the sweet spot — mechanical and biochemical properties that matched what cells experience in the body.
What comes next
Stowers and his team are now exploring whether they can use this approach to grow complex tissues and organs from patient cells, essentially using engineering principles to guide how cells develop. If that works, it opens a path toward personalized tissue engineering and a deeper understanding of why some cells turn cancerous while others don't.
