3D printing generally uses metal or plastic, but it isn’t limited to these materials. Chocolate, pasta and ash are among the stranger ingredients that have been printed, but none are as weird as a recent development – 3D printed brain tumours.
As anyone who’s gone through treatment can confirm, killing cancer is currently very difficult; there are no guaranteed cures, and often the patient needs to get sicker before they can recover. Scientists trying to develop better treatments will often take samples from a tumour and grow it in a lab, where they can experiment on it. However, cancer cells grown in a plastic petri dish act differently to in the body, which ends up wasting a lot of time and resources.
To solve this problem, a group of Israeli researchers created a brain-like environment (including working blood vessels), into which they placed a 3D printed tumour. Hopefully this new technique will allow more accurate tests that lead to new, effective cancer treatments.
Lachlan Writes Science 