New printable hydrogel offers potential for individualised cancer treatment

A new 3D printable hydrogel has been developed with the potential to revolutionise the emerging field of personalised cancer therapies.

Created by the Queensland University of Technology, the biomaterial features gelatine based on collagen that has been modified to engineer 3D tumour microenvironments or tumour models to test different cancer drugs.

By infusing the hydrogel with tumour cells, it will be possible to quickly create a number of models of patient-specific tumours, allowing many different drugs and combinations to be tested at once.

This will allow personalised treatments for each patient to be found in around a week or two. The modifiability of the gel will also make it easy to create models for all types of cancer, as well as underpinning research into stem cells and tissue engineering.

Professor Dietmar Hutmacher from Queensland University of Technology's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation said: "It is highly reproducible, which means we have been able to produce this hydrogel hundreds of times, not just once or twice in the lab, so researchers worldwide will be able to create it."