The Tissue Engineering Core at the Tufts Medical Center Cancer Center provides the medical and academic community with experimental in vitro and in vivo three-dimensional (3D) human tissue models.
These tissue models mimic the tissue architecture and signaling networks in human cancers. Through these 3D human tissue models, the program’s services help to meet the growing needs of Cancer Center members and academic investigators to translate basic science discoveries made in rudimentary 2D cultures to more complex tissue models, giving those discoveries greater clinical relevance.
These tissue models offer a more reliable correlation between in vitro studies and in vivo outcomes, while providing a “pre-clinical” experimental setting to screen agents that can accelerate discovery and development of potential therapeutics for clinical application.
Through the fabrication and analysis of 3D tissues, we create novel experimental paradigms that will:
- Enable investigation into the complex interplay between multiple cell and tissue types in a 3D tissue context that are critical factors in cancer progression.
- Provide a more global picture of human disease-associated pathways and their local microenvironment that can be used for target identification, validation, and interrogation.
- Serve as human, “pre-clinical” or “surrogate” tissues to translate discoveries to the clinic.
- Significantly support programs in experimental therapeutics by enabling drug development and discovery by testing lead compounds in 3D tissues rather than in currently existing cell-based assays, prior to testing these compounds in human tissues in vivo.
