It's almost, you know, science fiction inspired. The idea that you can come up with a design and use that to design a three-dimensional object that it would be alive.

You're 3D printing a living thing or creating a living thing based on a concept or a structure or maybe some imaging data is profound if you really think about it.

Bio printing is a way of producing a model fundamentally when we grow cells in the lab they

are a simplistic model of what's happening in in a human body and so bio printing is really there to develop more complex models. You can imagine the implications downstream for organ replacement. This could become hugely important in terms of people's health and wellbeing moving forward so I think we'll eventually get there and we'll be looking at more complex whole organs, but there's still a long way to go before we get to that functional level.

This is a bio printer. The technology in this printer is really being developed from advances in conventional 3D printing. So this is an extrusion based system in the same way that a conventional thermoplastic 3D printer extrudes hot plastic. This printer extrudes a cell laden bio ink. When we have printed our structure we're not really finished because we then culture it and it grows and over time it really develops into your final model. 

A lot of our initial work was working with a colorectal cancer surgeon and looking at whether we could develop personalised medicine profiles for frontline chemotherapy drugs and if we were able to potentially create mini versions of their cancer, we could help make decisions on whether or not to treat that person with that particular drug. 

So right now we are regularly bioprinting different cancers in different arrangements and testing them in different materials and we're performing co-cultures with immune cells to look at cancer immune interactions which are the foundation of a new line of treatments coming through called adoptive cell therapy. 

You may think that the world will be a better place with less cancer. But the reality is it's

a very complex disease and we need to study it in the most physiologically representative way we can. And we need to study it at scale. So we really need to be able to mass produce very sophisticated cancer models so that we can study all kinds of different treatment paradigms to figure out what's going to work best in the future. We're harnessing the power of robotics and automation to be able to answer questions that you couldn't answer any

other way. So on within the oncology or cancer space, we we're able to really go after problems that that you probably couldn't do any other way.