Sacrificial Bioprinting of a Mammary Ductal Carcinoma Model

Abstract

Cancer tissue engineering has remained challenging due to the limitations of the conventional biofabrication techniques to model the complex tumor microenvironment. Here, the utilization of a sacrificial bioprinting strategy is reported to generate the biomimetic mammary duct-like structure within a hydrogel matrix, which is further populated with breast cancer cells, to model the genesis of ductal carcinoma and its subsequent outward invasion. This bioprinted mammary ductal carcinoma model provides a proof-of-concept demonstration of the value of using the sacrificial bioprinting technique for engineering biologically relevant cancer models, which may be possibly extended to other cancer types where duct-like structures are involved.

3D bioprinting of complex tissues in vitro: state-of-the-art and future perspectives

“…Investigations of early onset of cancer cell invasion through cellular and tissue-level interactions in the adipose tissue were enabled by the 3D models. Duchamp et al (2019) established a sacrificial bioprinting strategy to generate biomimetic mammary duct cancer models to study the oncogenesis and invasion processes of breast cancer. The models were first generated with GelMA into duct-like structures, and the channels were then populated with MCF-7 cells, which was reported to have relatively low invasiveness.…”

3D bioprinting: current status and trends—a guide to the literature and industrial practice

“…Since the beginning (the first papers date back to 2002), 3D bioprinting has also been subject to pathology models for in vitro studies of diseases. In particular, 3D-bioprinted cancer models have been described for breast cancer [115][116][117][118][119][120][121], mammary ductal carcinoma [115], appendiceal cancer [122], mesothelioma [123], glioblastoma and metastasis. Other types of diseases that have been modeled through bioprinting include epilepsy [124], diabetes [110,125], degenerative diseases, immune-enhanced organoids for immunotherapy screening [126], and wound healing [127,128].…”

Vascularizing the brain in vitro

“…Therefore, direct bioprinting methods may not be able to respond to the presented need. However, sacrificial bioprinting, an indirect bioprinting method, has shown to be the most adequate to construct in vitro lumenized vasculature ( Duchamp et al., 2019 ; Li et al., 2020 ; Shao et al., 2020 ; Zhang et al., 2016b , 2017b ). This method is based on using a fugitive material that will be removed by external cues such the temperature.…”