3D Bioprinting for Cancer Models

Bioprinting is a challenging and dynamic field of tissue engineering that rapidly progresses in the latest 20 years. Firstly, the bioprinting idea has been strictly connected to the need of fabricating organ substitutes with minimal biological functionality for organ transplant’s purpose. In the latest years, thanks to the technological advances in biomaterial fields, bioprinting promoted the development of tissue constructs with biological functionality and architectural support. Current bioprinted models face the challenge to recapitulate the highly defined hierarchical organization of the cancer tissues. A gamechanger in bioprinting application is the possibility to recreate the tumor microenvironment in vitro, copycatting the multicellular organization of the cancer tissue, extracellular matrix properties, and tumor-metastatic architecture. In this chapter, an overview of 3D bioprinting technology applied to the most aggressive and complex cancer is proposed as a tool to fabricate viable constructs by depositing living cells with tunable biomaterials. The focus is on the platforms that are used to dissect the cell’s interactions in cancer and how these platforms are useful for the routine testing of drug compounds.