Matthew Gelber

Freeform 3D Printing

Biologists are increasingly using microfabrication to guide the behavior of cells in culture and to better approximate physiological structure and environment. In cancer particularly, where disease is diagnosed and graded based on abnormal tissue structure, recapitulating physiological structure in vitro is essential to developing representative disease models. Toward this end, I have developed freeform 3D printing, a method for creating 3D, branching channels in soft media. These channels and the surrounding medium can be seeded with cells to create an accurate model of the breast ducts, useful for in vitro studies of breast cancer. This technique can also be applied to make a variety of devices, from stents to monolithic microfluidic chips, and is scalable for applications ranging from millimeter-scale organs-on-chips to centimeter-scale vascularized tissues.

Michael Odarczenko

Environmentally Activated Self-Protecting Coatings