TumourPrint Project
How CELLINK is making cancer models more accurate and reproducible
Today, cancer research relies primarily on 2D cultures and animal models. These methods have their limitations – almost 95% of drug candidates fail in clinical trials despite showing promising results in preclinical trials. While they’re an important source of in vivo information, today’s preclinical models can’t mimic the complex processes of the human tumor microenvironment (TME).
Bioprinting is a new and innovative solution for modeling the human TME. Bioprinted tissues can be used in preclinical trials, and they have the potential to provide more predictive models of cancer biology in a reproducible and controlled environment. In the future, bioprinting can reduce the cost and time required to bring cancer therapies to market.
To support this effort, CELLINK is working on a project called TumourPrint. TumourPrint is a high-throughput system for bioprinting tumor constructs to serve as platforms in drug development and large-scale cancer research.
With further development, TumourPrint can:
- respond to stimuli more accurately than 2D cell cultures
- be produced swiftly and reproducibly, and
- enable highly viable and functional constructs that can be studied over extended periods of time.
In addition to enhanced TME models, the TumourPrint platform offers the potential to direct the future of personalized medicine. Its high-throughput capacity is essential to achieving deeper understanding of various types of cancer, as each type has unique properties and disease profiles that require thorough mechanistic and drug response investigations.
CELLINK’s TumourPrint system will enable users to implement large-scale products of reliable tumor models in-house to efficiently extract substantive data. These data will be impactful for drug candidate screening and evaluation, as well as for informing development of future drug candidates. In the future, CELLINK hopes to leverage TumourPrint data to develop more bioinks that represent specific cell lines and disease models to meet researchers’ needs.
The TumourPrint project is being funded in part by the European Union.
Call: H2020-SMEInst-2018-2020-2
Project Number: 829846
Project Acronym: TUMOURPRINT
Project title: High Throughput Bioprinting of Tumour Models for Drug Development and Oncology Research