And then came that pivotal day when his laboratory full of sophisticated engineering tools seemed almost empty:
“I can remember surveying from one corner of the lab all the way to the student offices and back… It was a fleeting sense of, ‘How can this be? How can I have all of these tools, and yet nothing?’ I couldn’t see a single way to help with cancer.”

Because of the late stage and aggressiveness of his cancer, Sawyer felt he had no time to lose, personally or professionally. He began to learn as much as he could about the disease, but the discourse of oncology research was confounding.

“As an engineer, it was shocking,” he says. “It was as if I had just stepped into this completely foreign, chaotic field where a ton of smart people were working, and I couldn’t understand what was going on.”

On a personal level, however, his investigation led him to a clear understanding that he should participate in an immunotherapy trial. It was a lot of work to get on the trial—seven months from definitive diagnosis through multiple rounds of radiation, three surgeries, and then the confined checkpoint immunotherapy.

Meanwhile, he stayed the course with the lab’s engineering work, but privately his passions had shifted. He was sitting in on cancer lectures at the medical school and talking to colleagues there about what they needed—hoping there was something he could contribute as an engineer. Those conversations would lead to a life-changing question.

One day in a discussion about 3D printing research, a molecular biologist colleague asked, “Could you 3D print cancer?” Sawyer calls it the big “Oh, I know how to help” moment.

“Cancer researchers need cancer that they can tear apart and learn from. And it’s hard to do that in patients,” he explains. “That was the moment. And ever since then, every day, everything I can give goes to building the infrastructure to make this possible.”

Sawyer had discovered that the “something” he needed to build was the very thing he needed to conquer: cancer tumors. It launched a complete transformation of his lab toward becoming the world’s first cancer engineering labs. And his colleagues were eager to help.

Sawyer formed a team of engineering peers and students, together with biologists, surgeons, and immunologists.

“I think this may just be the nature of collaboration,” he says. “But everybody I’ve ever asked for help always said ‘yes’; it’s been the most rewarding collaboration of my life.”

His skilled and dedicated team’s goal—to build living, 3D models of cancer—would prove to nonetheless be a tremendous challenge. In their early attempts to grow cancer, they ended up making dead cells. How, they wondered, could they provide, in a synthetic environment, the nutrients that cells need to make tumors? For one thing, they had to re-envision what a multiwell plate would look like for a 3D tumor. It was an ideal challenge for his lab—based on available infrastructure, figure out how to make multiwell plates provide driven, controlled flow in 3D.

“We turned it into an engineering problem,” he says, “and then it didn’t seem so phenomenological. Once we understood what the tumors needed, we turned that into our problem.”

And it worked. “We’re seeing it,” he reports. “We’re adding immune cells to patient-derived tumoroids that we have taken, and grown, and placed in imaging profusion systems, and then watching immune cells killing these tumoroids.”

“And this is just the starting point … We didn’t fly the first Mars Rover that we built,” he says.

To get beyond this starting point, Sawyer sees promise in his collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific.

“Thermo Fisher has been wonderful in helping us with basic infrastructure. Everything from our freezers, incubators, and centrifuges to the entire suite of molecular biology products we use, including ELISA plates, plate readers, PCR instruments—the whole setup. One of the strengths of Thermo Fisher is breadth. You can get everything you need, and you know you’re getting quality stuff. Our lab is built on the back of instrumentation and reagents from Thermo Fisher.”

One of the portfolios most critical to his lab’s 3D modeling efforts to drive innovation in cancer research is the line of Thermo Scientific and Gibco 3D cell culture products from Thermo Fisher Scientific.

“But it’s even more than providing good products—there’s also an inquisitiveness with Thermo Fisher,” he says. “They’re evaluating what we’re doing to see how they can help us make things available to other labs.” Sawyer’s goal is to have cancer engineering labs everywhere—and if researchers could order everything they need, it could help.

“We’re working hard with Thermo Fisher to try to make that a reality.”

While Sawyer has been making such remarkable contributions to cancer research, he doesn’t talk much about his own battle with cancer, except as a means of illuminating his path to battling it for everyone. He’s focused on what can be accomplished today. “It’s a gift to be here,” he says. “And I am aware of it every day. I try not to waste days. This is the future, so let’s all roll up our sleeves and work together.”