Rowan University has secured a two-year, $155,000 grant from the National Cancer Institute to 3D print living models of chondrosarcoma, a bone cancer that resists both chemotherapy and radiation. Issued under award number R03CA301103, the project will use a bioprinter to deposit tumour cells and mesenchymal stem cells at measured distances inside centimetre-scale hydrogel blocks, then track the two populations for 30 days to establish whether they migrate toward one another.
The principal investigator is Andrea Vernengo, associate professor of chemical and biomedical engineering in Rowan’s Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering. Her co-principal investigator is Tae Won B. Kim, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University (CMSRU) and an orthopaedic oncologist at Cooper University Health Care and MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper.
The hypothesis under test is that chondrosarcoma cells chemically recruit healthy stem cells and convert them into collaborators, a process Vernengo says “essentially turns the stem cells into accomplices that help out the tumor cells.”
Andrea Vernengo, Ph.D., uses 3D cell printing to study cell interactions to better understand a type of bone cancer that resists existing treatments. Photo via Rowan University.
Printing cells at a controlled distance
The platform is built around samples of hydrogel, a soft biocompatible material, roughly a centimetre in scale. A specialised cell printer deposits the two cell types as separate clusters inside a stack of ringed channels within the gel.
Spacing is the experimental variable. Because the gel is temperature-responsive, the team can loosen its texture by changing the temperature and release the cells to move, converting a static construct into a migration assay. Vernengo’s group will then watch for 30 days to see whether the clusters converge, which she calls a “hallmark of cellular communication,” while also measuring metabolic activity and gene expression.
Two collaborators handle the molecular readout. Sophia Orbach, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, will profile RNA inside individual cells to reconstruct how the stem cells’ identity shifts over time under the tumour’s influence. Susy Kohout, associate professor of biomedical sciences at CMSRU, will lead analysis of the molecular events that drive stem cells to adopt the new, cancer-promoting behaviour.
Printing the diseases that drugs have failed
The strategic logic is that chondrosarcoma’s resistance is partly a modelling failure. Flat culture erases the variable the hypothesis rests on, the distance a signal must cross between tumour cell and stem cell, while animal models restore the geometry but hide the exchange. Vernengo’s answer is to build that geometry deliberately and treat the platform, not any single result, as the asset.
Bioprinted models have already changed answers in diseases with the same profile. A US-German team’s bioprinted glioblastoma construct, built from human brain cells with perfused vascular channels and imaged by laser scanning at Rensselaer, showed temozolomide killing cells in two dimensions while the tumour regrew across two months in three. matching what patients experience and flagging a failing candidate before animal work. Northeastern’s Guohao Dai framed the problem as the difficulty of seeing inside a brain tumour at all.
Commercial platforms are following: McGill spinout TissueTinker is building a licensable library of miniature bioprinted tumours for pharmaceutical screening, while Carcinotech and CELLINK have worked on standardised protocols assembling bioprinted tumours from five cell types in defined ratios.
Rowan sits at the front of that sequence, where the glioblastoma work began: one construct built to test one hypothesis, on two years and $155,000. Licensable libraries and screening contracts come later, if the biology holds. For now the only question is whether the stem cells really do behave like accomplices.
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Featured image shows Andrea Vernengo, Ph.D., uses 3D cell printing to study cell interactions to better understand a type of bone cancer that resists existing treatments. Photo via Rowan University.