Chondrosarcoma is a bone cancer with an unusual problem: the standard tools of cancer medicine do not work on it. Chemotherapy largely fails. Radiation largely fails. Surgery with wide margins is the only treatment that reliably helps.
Researchers at Rowan University are taking a different approach to understanding why, using a 3D printer to build living models of the tumor's neighborhood. The two-year, $155,000 project is funded by the National Cancer Institute and led by Andrea Vernengo, an associate professor of chemical and biomedical engineering in Rowan's Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering, with co-principal investigator Tae Won B. Kim, an associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University and an orthopaedic oncologist at Cooper University Health Care and MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper.
