3D printing applications for the treatment of cancer

Purpose: Additive manufacturing (AM) is an innovation in today's medical field. It helps create a patient-specific 3D model of bones, nerves, organs and blood vessel. Now, doctors and surgeons have successfully applied this technology to plan different types of treatments and also cancers. The purpose of this paper is to study the requirements and applications of AM for cancer treatment. Methods: Today AM is used for the application of regenerative medicine. It can help develop and improve invitro models in the tumour microenvironment. Thus, to identify its applications, related research papers on AM for cancer are studied. Results: 3D printing technology has a unique capability to manufacture tumour models. It helps to understand the status of the whole tumor. Here in this paper, we studied the capabilities of AM technologies for cancer treatment. This study discusses necessary process steps, followed by 3D printing and finally identified significant applications of these technologies for cancer treatment with a brief description. Conclusion: 3D printed tumor helps to provide faithful studies on metastasis. These models create a promising platform to construct biomimetic models. By accurate manufacturing of in vitro model, this technology seems to be the best tool to facilitate complex treatment, surgery and therapies. It shows great potential for the printing of organs. This technology is time-saving and avoids time-consuming processes. It has been analysed that AM helps in reducing the duration of treatment of a cancer patient. Researchers are focusing on reducing pain during therapies. They have also tested 3D printed tumor models for different drugs, to eliminate the risks. These models play a significant role in courses of treatments.