Building the OSUCCC – James Center for Cancer Engineering (CCE): The Skardal Biofabricaton Lab
The research program in the Skardal Biofabrication Lab, led by Aleksander Skardal, PhD, focuses on the design and implementation of extracellular matrix-inspired hydrogel biomaterials for the biofabrication of tissue and tumor organoids, organ-on-a-chip systems and cancer-on-a-chip systems for drug screening, disease modeling and personalized medicine.
The Skardal Lab is a central feature of the CCE, and a 2020 Pelotonia Idea Grant helped these scientists establish a foothold and move their research forward. Many of the initial collaborations that have started since the lab arrived at Ohio State have accelerated and yielded strong results in 2022.
The team deployed its organoid-based metastasis-on-a-chip platform within both thyroid cancer (with Matthew Ringel, MD) and adrenocortical carcinoma (with Priya Dedhia, MD, PhD). The organ-on-a-chip model of the pre-metastatic niche made significant progress toward perhaps one of the first fully in vitro models of the pre-metastatic in colorectal cancer.
