95. Finding Better Cancer Cures By Printing Tumors

What this episode covers

Hosts Daniel and Forbode discuss research from Professor Osbolat’s lab at Penn State, which uses 3D bioprinting to create synthetic breast cancer tumors for drug testing. The team employs aspiration-assisted bioprinting to generate multi-scale vascularized tumors, allowing them to simulate drug delivery and test both chemotherapy and experimental immunotherapies. This platform serves as a pre-clinical surrogate, accelerating the feedback loop for drug development by validating treatments on printed tissue before human clinical trials. The hosts highlight how this technology, originally developed to solve a specific cancer problem, has become a valuable open-source tool for the broader scientific community to accelerate cancer research.