Often, potential cancer drugs that show initial promise in lab tests don’t pan out when tested in animals or people. One reason is that the cancer cells used in conventional lab tests—two-dimensional cultures grown in plastic dishes—don’t behave much like real tumor cells.

So Fischbach-Teschl is making more realistic test subjects by growing cells from oral, breast and brain cancer within porous polymer scaffolds—similar to the technique used to grow skin cells for burn victims. “This allows us to produce cancer models with real tissue properties,” she says. “Cells within these engineered systems interact with other cells and their surroundings more like they do in cancer patients.”

To grow beyond a certain size, tumors secrete growth factors that trick the body into growing blood vessels to keep cells in the center supplied with oxygen. Fischbach-Teschl is trying to better understand this process so she can make even more realistic cancer models.

“You need more than one growth factor for blood vessels to be induced and mature and they need to be sequenced in a well concerted manner,” she says, “but in tumors their interaction is pretty perturbed, so the number and characteristics of vessels in tumors is very different and that contributes to enhanced malignancy and aggressiveness.”

With a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical technology from the University of Regensburg in Germany, Fischbach-Teschl also has an interest in drug delivery strategies which has informed her tissue engineering work. “The polymers I use now for cell delivery strategies were originally developed for drug delivery,” she says.

Until the completion of the new Life Sciences Technology Building, Fischbach-Teschl’s lab will be located at the College of Veterinary Medicine’s Baker Institute for Animal Health. She is looking forward to collaborating with multiple groups on the Ithaca campus, as well as from Cornell’s Weill Medical College.

Although Fischbach-Teschl’s grandmother died from cancer when she was very young, she says that’s not why she became interested in cancer research. “I just really felt that this is an area I would like to be involved in because it’s affecting so many people,” she says.

Prof. Fischbach-Teschl's Web page