The Business of Biofabrication

Oregon Health & Science University has secured a $9.2 million federal grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop next-generation organs-on-chips technology aimed at advancing research into bone-related cancers.

The work will be led by researchers at OHSU’s Knight Cancer Precision Biofabrication Hub, where scientists are focused on recreating complex tumor-bone interactions in the laboratory using patient-derived cells. The grant will fund efforts to build microengineered systems that replicate the human bone and tumor environment — giving researchers a far more accurate window into how cancers grow, spread, and resist treatment than traditional lab models allow.

Why Bone Cancers Are Hard to Model

Bone-related cancers present a particular challenge for researchers: the bone microenvironment is structurally complex, and tumors don’t simply sit within it — they actively invade and remodel surrounding tissue. That complexity has made it difficult to study these cancers in conventional laboratory settings, and has contributed to the slow pace of treatment development in this area.

Organs-on-chips address this directly. These are small microengineered devices designed to mimic the structure and function of human tissues, allowing scientists to observe disease behavior and test potential therapies under conditions that more closely resemble what happens inside the body.

Building on Existing Work

The new NIH funding expands on previous biofabrication and chip-based research at OHSU, rather than starting from scratch. The Knight Cancer Precision Biofabrication Hub has already been developing platforms to simulate cancer biology; this grant scales that work specifically toward bone cancer applications.

The research goal is to identify how cancer cells interact with bone tissue and to accelerate the development of more targeted, effective treatments. OHSU frames this as part of a broader institutional push to improve both early detection and patient outcomes.

Why This Matters

Securing $9.2M in NIH funding for a disease-specific organs-on-chips program is a meaningful signal. It suggests federal funders are comfortable backing these platforms not just as proof-of-concept technology, but as applied tools for understanding specific cancers. For the broader biofabrication sector, academic programs like OHSU’s help build the evidence base that pharmaceutical partners and investors increasingly expect before committing to organ-on-chip platforms.