A Workshop for Integrative Additive Biomanufacturing and Tumor Engineering, Bethesda, MD, February 19-20, 2015

Suny At Binghamton, Binghamton NY

Investigators

Abstract

PI: Mahler, Gretchen J. Proposal Number: 1464736 Creation of highly organized multicellular tumor constructs could potentially revolutionize oncology and tissue engineering. The recent advances in additive biomanufacturing, oncology, tissue engineering, microfabrication, and materials science offers new opportunities for creating sophisticated and vascularized 3D tumor models in vitro by printing or depositing materials and cancer and its surrounding cells layer-by-layer precisely with the help of a high-precision robot. These lab-produced high order tumor tissues can be used as disease models for both pathophysiological studies and drug discovery. Here, the PI proposes an NSF-NIH joint Workshop in integrative advanced biomanufacturing and tumor engineering. The overarching goal of this workshop is to bring together scientific leaders to review the progress, to identify grand challenges in integrating additive manufacturing with tumor engineering, and finally to articulate a vision to advance physical sciences and engineering in life sciences and oncology. The emerging of additive biomanufacturing, human genome editing, stem cell engineering, material genome techniques, computational and synthetic biology, and personalized medicine offers new opportunities to spur research, education, industry growth and innovation in tumor engineering. The following objectives are expected to be achieved through the workshop: 1) Identify challenges in biomanufacturing of tumor models that express key characteristics of human tumors in vivo, 2) Develop a community to share ideas, resources, and technologies to address challenges identified through the workshop, 3) Establish a forum for engineers to collaborate with oncologists or vice versa in tumor engineering research, 4) Increase public awareness of tumor engineering research, 5) Promote tumor engineering research and education programs, and train and educate students in tumor engineering research. The workshop will be held in Bethesda, MD, February 19-20, 2015. It will consist of panel presentations and in-depth discussions by leading scholars and researchers. The panel discussion will be led by a session chair and documented by a scribe. The scribe will be responsible for developing a session report based on the discussions. The session report will be further extended into a Workshop Report that will be published and accessible by the public. The workshop will tentatively consist of four sessions including "Tumor-on-A-Chip", "3D Printing of Multiple Tissues Integrated Physiological Tumor Models", "Noninvasive Characterization of 3D Printed Tumor Tissues", and "Multiscale Tumor Computational Modeling". While there have been increasingly more workshops and symposia in additive manufacturing held or planned lately, no workshops or symposia, to the best of organizers' knowledge, have significant overlap with the proposed workshop. It is expected that this workshop will initiate and stimulate the discussion on integrating additive biomanufacturing with tumor engineering and spur collaboration among engineers, oncologists, and life scientists. The findings of the Workshop will be disseminated in several different ways. The report will be published and accessible to the research community. A perspective paper stemmed from the Workshop will be published in a peer-review journal. The workshop will serve as an open forum for researchers and scholars to interact with each other and to exchange ideas. Efforts will be made to recruit early career investigators and investigators from underrepresented groups to participate in the workshop.