Washington: Researchers have successfully 3D bioprinted Breast disease Tumors and their treatment in a breakthrough study to better understand the disease, one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide.
A scientific first, the achievement lays the foundation for the precision fabrication of tumor models. Progress will enable future studies and developments Anti-cancer therapy “In vivo” — or “in animals” — without the use of experimentation.
“This will help us understand how human immune cells interact with solid tumors,” said Ibrahim Ozbolat, a Penn State professor of engineering science and mechanics, biomedical engineering and neurosurgery, and senior author of the study. “We have developed a tool that serves as a clinical testing platform to accurately assess the safety and efficacy of experimental therapies. It allows immunologists to understand how a tumor grows, how it interacts with human cells, and how it metastasizes.” and also a research platform for biologists. and spread in the body.”
Ozbolat’s lab specializes in 3D printing to create a range of tissues for use in human health. Two journal articles about the lab’s work using 3D bioprinting to aid breast cancer studies were recently published in Advanced Functional Materials and Biofabrication.
The researchers used a relatively new technique called aspiration-assisted bioprinting to precisely locate tumors and create tissues in three dimensions. The researchers then engineered the tissue into a multi-scale vascularized breast tumor model with blood vessels, which they found responded to chemotherapy and cell-based immunotherapeutics.
The team first validated the accuracy of their tumor model by treating it with doxorubicin, an anthracycline-based chemotherapeutic drug used to treat breast cancer. By finding a bioprinted tumor that responded to chemotherapy, the researchers teamed up with Jackson Laboratory immunologist Dr. Together with Derya Unutmaz tested cell-based immunotherapeutic treatments on the tumor.
Researchers used human CAR-T cells that had been created by gene editing to identify and fight an aggressive form of breast cancer cells. After 72 hours of circulating the edited CAR-T cells through the tumor, the researchers found that the cells within the bioprinted tumor had generated a positive immune response and were fighting the cancer cells.
“Our model is made from human cells, but what we make is a very simplified version of the human body,” Ozbolat said. “There are many details that exist in the original microenvironment that we cannot replicate, or even think of replicating. We aim for simplicity in complexity. We want to gain a fundamental understanding of how these systems work — and We need. The growth process to be streamlined, because we don’t have time to wait for tumors to grow at their natural pace.”
Ozbolat explained that despite significant advances in cancer treatment, there is a lack of pre-clinical platforms to study experimental anti-cancer agents. Relying on clinical trials to test treatment efficacy ultimately limits the successful clinical translation of anticancer therapies, he said. The development of bioprinted models may open entirely new ways of understanding the tumor microenvironment and the body’s immune response.
“Immunotherapy has already been shown to be a promising treatment for hematologic malignancies,” Ozbolat said. “Essentially, the patient’s immune cells are removed and gene-edited to be cytotoxic to the cancer cells, then reintroduced into the patient’s bloodstream. Circulation is important because the altered cells need to circulate around the body. With tumors, That kind of effective circulation. doesn’t exist, so we built our model to try to better understand how tumors respond to immunotherapy.”
Ozbolat and his colleagues are now working with tumors removed from real breast cancer patients. Researchers will apply immunotherapeutics to patient-derived tumors to see how they respond.
“This is an important step in understanding the complexities of the disease, which is necessary if we are going to develop novel therapies and targeted therapies against cancer,” Ozbolat said.
