Artificial lung the size of a sugar cube
The 3-D lung tumor model helps researchers to test medications. Lung cancer is a serious condition. Once patients are diagnosed with it, chemotherapy is often their only hope. But nobody can accurately predict whether or not this treatment will help. To start with, not all patients respond to a course of chemotherapy in exactly the same way. And then there's the fact that the systems drug companies use to test new medications leave a lot to be desired. "Animal models may be the best we have at the moment, but all the same, 75 percent of the drugs deemed beneficial when tested on animals fail when used to treat humans," explains Prof. Dr. Heike Walles, head of the Würzburg-based "Regenerative Technologies for Oncology" project group belonging to the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB.