Abstract

3D Printing of Patient-Specific Brain Cancer Model

Hee-Gyeong Yi, Researcher, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea

Demand for a patient-specific cancer model is critical to predicting the valuable clinical benefit of new drug combinations for personalized medicine. Since there are large numbers of drug candidates, the test solely relying on animals requires the prohibitively expensive and time-consuming procedures. Although the ex vivo cancer models are favorable to conduct high-throughput screening, their translational applications have been hindered by the inability to reflect the tumor micro-environment including three-dimensional (3D) extracellular matrix (ECM) and the cancer-associated cells. A challenge is to simultaneously mimic the dimensionality, complexity, and heterogeneity of the original environment. Here, we describe 3D printing technology for generating a highly biomimetic platform that replicates the heterogeneous tumor micro-environment and thereby can be a patient-specific model of human brain cancer. Our approach is demonstrated to have a promise to replicate the patient's brain cancer. We expect that our approach is probably applicable to other cancers.