Scientists were able to lay down the first steps towards creating cancer

Apr 18, 2014 07:12 GMT  ·  By

You're probably wondering why anyone would want to create tumors, or anything along those lines. Apparently, it's all for the greater good of humanity. More specifically, it's meant to help cure cancer eventually.

Pretty much everyone knows that cancer is one of the worst and most persistent plagues affecting humankind right now.

That's why there are hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists constantly researching ways of fighting the disease.

Since cancer can be both a tumor and spread over the body, you wouldn't think that 3D printing technology could help researchers much.

As it turns out, a group of scientists do not share that opinion. In fact, they believe that the secret to beating cancer lies in creating some.

So, they decided to use 3D printing technology to create some tumors. They haven't quite made it all the way yet, but they're close.

3D printing should allow the tumors to behave more like the real things, like cancerous flesh, reacting to treatments and even growing over time. Normally, tumor models are grown in a dish and don't really imitate the real thing properly.

The entire process is described on the Institute of Physics’ journal Biofabrication, but we'll try to give you a rundown of it. It’s a surprisingly violent process really, on a cellular level.

Hela cells and gelatin/alginate/fibrinogen hydrogels were used as the material for constructing in vitro cervical tumor models.

The Center for Animal Experiments/A3 Lab in Wuhan University provided the cells, after which the team created their own 3D cell printer.

Initially, most of the cells died when they tried to put them into a correct formation, but eventually a method was discovered that preserved 90% of them.

As described in the journal, “a 2D planar culture sample was prepared by seeding Hela at a density of 5000 cells cm−2 in 35 mm petri dishes with 2 mL culture media per dish. 3D Hela/hydrogel constructs and 2D samples were cultured in H-DMEM supplemented with 20 mg L−1 aprotinin.”

Aprotinin inhibited fibrin degradation and kept the constructs stable, because it is a proteinase inhibitor.

The ultimate goal is to figure out how and why cancerous cells replicate indefinitely, and how they can be stopped. We imagine that plenty of 3D printed tumors will take the fall for humanity before that goal is achieved.

“Advances in 3D printing have enabled direct assembly of cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) materials to form in vitro cellular models for 3D biology, the study of disease pathogenesis and new drug discovery. This promising technique has offered an opportunity for the biofabrication of complex 3D in vitro models with simulated physiological microenvironments,” the study reads.