Here are just a few of the incredible people at the Knight Cancer Institute working to transform cancer science, early detection and the future of patient care. Read the full story.
Luiz Bertassoni, D.D.S., Ph.D.
Joined OHSU from Harvard Medical School and MIT
Founding director of the Knight Cancer Precision Biofabrication Hub, professor at the Division of Oncological Sciences and co-section head for Discovery and Translational Oncology
Bertassoni leads a multidisciplinary research group working on several groundbreaking uses of biofabrication to study cancer, including 3D bioprinting, organs-on-a-chip, and stem cell regenerative medicine.
Bioprinting healthy and diseased human tissues helps understand cancer complexity in a controllable and manipulable way. This level of detail isn’t possible with the classic research methods of animal models or patient samples, because engineered models can be manipulated to either replicate or change the characteristics of tumor evolution and how they spread in the body. This gives scientists a better understanding of how tumors grow and change, so ultimately cancerous tumors can be detected earlier on.
In 2023, the Biofabrication Hub secured more than $1 million in funding, half of which was contributed by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust and matched by OHSU and other funders.
“There’s a tremendous amount of excitement with the possibility of enabling a better, faster solution for patients. It’s this dream of being able to take all the complexity of one patient’s cancer and replicate that same tumor 100 times and expose it to all types of drug combinations or stressors that you could imagine, to find the best, most effective drug combination possible or predict which patients are more at risk. For patients, I think that gives them a lot of hope. It’s one of the directions that we’re working hard to enable, because we believe that this can make a big difference for patients’ lives.”
