Karen J.L. Burg, PHD; Clemson University; Era of Hope Scholar Award:

The Era of Hope Scholarship grant that we received is to fund the creation of a complex tissue structure. So, in other words, to fund the creation of breast tissue that is not used for reconstructive purposes, but rather it's used for off-the-shelf laboratory-based applications.

So, for example, if a cell biologist wanted to investigate the interaction of cancer cells with healthy cells, we could create a three dimensional, of what we call a tissue-test system that they would be able to use in a laboratory. And, so the idea is that it is comprised of cells of biological component but it is also comprised of materials. And, that's our expertise in the area of materials development. So, we can actually fashion materials that mimic the complex structure of breast tissue which is very, very complicated and very, very heterogeneous in nature. And, to do that, we've actually have been working with electrical engineers who have been designing custom-made bioprinters. And, the bioprinters allow one to deposit cells and materials into three-dimensional arrays. So, in other words, we can spaciously locate cells and materials in three dimensions. And, in other words, we can take a scan of tissue, whether it be healthy or whether it be cancerous tissue, and place that in digitized information that we could extract the information and instead of printing red, blue, black ink, instead we can print materials, cells, and growth factors for example, or anti-cancer therapeutics. So, it's very, very powerful because we're not taking these components and mixing them in a petri dish where we would sit back and hope that they could magically self assemble, but rather we're specifically placing these various components into the appropriate locations where they would normally be found in the body or in the tissue. And, so, here you can see some examples, so we would like to be able to take a picture, histological photograph of a tissue, and so in this case, we're looking at myoepithelial cells and luminal epithelial cells and we can digitize that so we can actually plot, in this case, in purple and orange where the specific cells should be placed. And, that information is conveyed to our custom printer which is in three dimensions, so it moves this way, and that way as well, and we can make a block of tissue that again, a cell biologist might use for examining a particular question. You can also use these types of tissue structures for developments of new vaccines or to test anti-cancer therapies.