3D-Printed Brain Clear the Way to Find Cancer Treatments
Reported by: Irina Robu, PhD
Glioblastomas are aggressive and malignant grade IV brain tumors and can located wherever in the brain and do not regularly spread outside of the brain. Common symptoms patients with glioblastoma experience include headaches, seizures, confusion, memory loss, muscle weakness, visual changes, language deficit, and cognitive changes. Glioblastomas tend to affect older individuals (age 45 to 70) with rare occurrences in children. Treatment methods typically include a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and alternating electric fields therapy.
Scientists at Northwestern University developed a technique to study their fast spreading cancer using a 3D structure made of agglomeration of human brain cells and biomaterials, which can help doctors better understand how the tumor grows and speed up the potential discovery of novel drugs to fight it. A water-based substance serves as a matrix to hold the cells into place. However, inside the living brain, scientists can’t observe how the tumor cells grow or respond the treatment and they have to use mice/rats to understand tumor development. Animal studies are expensive and time consuming, but the 3D printed live tissue allows researchers to study glioblastoma to be studied more directly.
To understand what happens inside the 3D model, the researchers used a laser to scan the sample and create a snapshot of the cellular structure. This combination allows them to assess the effectiveness of a commonly used chemotherapy drug, temozolomide. The drug, temozolomide kills glioblastoma cells in two-dimensional models, but when put into a three-dimensional one, the tumor rebounded which implies that the drug did not work in the long term.
This 3D model may be able to speed up that process to weed out ineffective drugs first, confirming that only the most promising ones move to animal, and eventually human, trials.
SOURCE
A 3D-printed brain could make it easier to find cancer treatments
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This is very insightful. There is no doubt that there is the bias you refer to. 42 years ago, when I was postdocing in biochemistry/enzymology before completing my residency in pathology, I knew that there were very influential mambers of the faculty, who also had large programs, and attracted exceptional students. My mentor, it was said (although he was a great writer), could draft a project on toilet paper and call the NIH. It can’t be true, but it was a time in our history preceding a great explosion. It is bizarre for me to read now about eNOS and iNOS, and about CaMKII-á, â, ã, ä – isoenzymes. They were overlooked during the search for the genome, so intermediary metabolism took a back seat. But the work on protein conformation, and on the mechanism of action of enzymes and ligand and coenzyme was just out there, and became more important with the research on signaling pathways. The work on the mechanism of pyridine nucleotide isoenzymes preceded the work by Burton Sobel on the MB isoenzyme in heart. The Vietnam War cut into the funding, and it has actually declined linearly since.
A few years later, I was an Associate Professor at a new Medical School and I submitted a proposal that was reviewed by the Chairman of Pharmacology, who was a former Director of NSF. He thought it was good enough. I was a pathologist and it went to a Biochemistry Review Committee. It was approved, but not funded. The verdict was that I would not be able to carry out the studies needed, and they would have approached it differently. A thousand young investigators are out there now with similar letters. I was told that the Department Chairmen have to build up their faculty. It’s harder now than then. So I filed for and received 3 patents based on my work at the suggestion of my brother-in-law. When I took it to Boehringer-Mannheim, they were actually clueless.