It’s probably safe to say that most people have been affected by cancer in one way or another, whether in being diagnosed themselves or watching a loved one battle the disease. There are researchers who are working to detect cancer using 3D printed devices, but it’s not always fast enough. The technology has also been called on many times to help create cancer treatments, from testing new drugs on 3D printed tumors to developing innovative drug delivery systems.
Obviously, it’s not easy trying to treat cancer, and research shows that most often, cancer kills due to how it metastasizes, or spreads, in a person’s body. What’s difficult is not being able to experiment with metastasis itself, to see what can be done to stop cancer from spreading.
But now, researchers from Purdue University have a better understanding of how cancer metastasizes, thanks to a lifelike cancer environment assistant professor of biomedical engineering Luis Solorio made out of polymer material. This environment can also provide scientists and doctors with a better way to predict if and how certain drugs can stop the spread of cancer.
This would normally be the part of the story where I tell you that 3D printing played a major part in developing this polymer cancer environment. While that is true to a point, Solorio’s work needed technology that could deliver even more accuracy.
Solorio explained, “We need a much finer resolution than what a 3-D printer can create.”
There have been other studies where researchers created a controlled cancer-like environment with 3D printing, but those replicas were not realistic enough for the purposes of accurate drug screening. Instead, Solorio and his research team are using technology known as 3D writing to make these replica cancer environments.
The Purdue researchers developed a device for 3D jet writing, which is a form of electrospinning. This method uses an electrically charged syringe, which contains a polymer solution, to spin out fiber threads from this solution and deposit them onto a plate in order to build a 3D scaffold structure that facilitates cell activity.
A 3D jet writer produces polymer structures that model the biological tissue cancer cells penetrate. [Image: Purdue University, Luis Solorio]
Solorio and the Purdue researchers recently published a paper on their 3D jet writing work, titled “3D Jet Writing: Functional Microtissues Based on Tessellated Scaffold Architectures,” in the journal Advanced Materials.
These initial published findings are based on Solorio's work while part of a team at the University of Michigan’s Biointerfaces Institute; he finished writing the paper and completed the data analysis while he was on the Purdue faculty.
This diagram conceptualizes the 3D jet writer a Purdue researcher is using to engineer a cancer microenvironment. [Image: Purdue University, Luis Solorio]
The abstract reads, “The advent of adaptive manufacturing techniques supports the vision of cell-instructive materials that mimic biological tissues. 3D jet writing, a modified electrospinning process reported herein, yields 3D structures with unprecedented precision and resolution offering customizable pore geometries and scalability to over tens of centimeters. These scaffolds support the 3D expansion and differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cells in vitro. Implantation of these constructs leads to the healing of critical bone defects in vivo without exogenous growth factors. When applied as a metastatic target site in mice, circulating cancer cells home in to the osteogenic environment simulated on 3D jet writing scaffolds, despite implantation in an anatomically abnormal site. Through 3D jet writing, the formation of tessellated microtissues is demonstrated, which serve as a versatile 3D cell culture platform in a range of biomedical applications including regenerative medicine