Glioblastoma on a Chip

Researchers use 3-D printing technology to construct a brain cancer model that accurately recapitulated in vivo biology and predicted patient drug responses.

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The paper

H.-G. Yi et al., “A bioprinted human-glioblastoma-on-a-chip for the identification of patient-specific responses to chemoradiotherapy,” Nat Biomed Eng, 3:509–519, 2019.

Hee-Gyeong Yi was a new graduate student in Dong-Woo Cho’s group at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea in 2012 when she came upon a study that had used three-dimensional scaffolds to build models of oral tumors. If arranging cells in a particular formation was a good way to build cancer models that mimic what’s going on in the body, Yi, who had been working on 3-D printing of cartilage cells at the time, thought: “Why not print cancer?”

She discussed the idea with fellow Cho lab members, then approached group collaborator Sun Ha Paek, a neurosurgeon at Seoul National University College of Medicine who proposed using glioblastoma (GBM) to test the idea. “[GBM] patients suffer from the extraordinarily ...

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Meet the Author

  • Jef Akst

    Jef Akst was managing editor of The Scientist, where she started as an intern in 2009 after receiving a master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses.

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On Target July Issue The Scientist
July/August 2019

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