Tumor engineering: Applications for cancer biology and drug development

A major one, which contributes to the drug development costs averaging more than 1.7 billion dollars per year for each FDA-approved drug,1 is the inability to accurately predict in advance which preclinical drug candidates will ultimately prove benecial in time-consuming and costly late-stage clinical trials. As oncologists and cancer biologists can attest to, though it is relatively easy to eradicate cancer within cell lines and animals, potential drug candidates tested with these model systems oen show little or no ecacy when tested in humans. To close this void, preclinical models of cancer must improve to the fullest extent possible to better replicate, ex vivo, the complexity that occurs naturally. Toward that end, applications previously intended for regenerative tissue engineering are nding new uses for the creation of bioengineered tumor models, that is, multicellular three-dimensional (3D) tumor-like constructs that rely upon nonnative biomimetic microenvironments or scaolds to recapitulate dening cancer characteristics such as malignant transformation, invasion, or growth.