Making the smallest machines of life big enough to hold in your hands

Several years ago, donors Mark and Nikki Mahan gave Fred Hutch Cancer Center a 3D printer, and Matthew Ross, PhD, has put it to good use. 

Ross, who is the communications liaison for Fred Hutch’s Basic Sciences Division, uses the printer to create spare parts, customized equipment and teaching tools for Fred Hutch researchers, including:

A 3D printer is basically a nozzle attached to a robotic arm. Following a computerized blueprint, the nozzle squirts out a ribbon of melted plastic onto a platform, laying down one thin layer on top of another with tightly controlled motions. Those layers stack into a three-dimensional object.

Ross learned about 3D printing during graduate school and took it up as a hobby, making him ideally suited to make the most of the donor’s gift to Fred Hutch.

He has used the 3D printer to greatly magnify the structures of proteins, the complex molecules that do the cell’s work. He can create a scale model of proteins researchers have already defined with atomic resolution that biologists can hold in their hands.

“Determining the shape of protein molecules lets researchers better know how these dynamic molecules move and interact with other parts of our cells and critically how we can then engineer proteins that improve human health,” Ross said.

His ability to make customized models of life’s smallest machines was especially useful for Roland Strong, PhD, whose Basic Sciences lab uses the tools of structural biology to understand the mechanisms of vaccines and the human immune system.

Last summer, Ulysses Foote-McNabb, a research technician in the Strong Lab, worked with Ross to make some models of proteins that would help Amelia Laing, a Ballard High School student.

Laing, who is blind, was working in the lab with the Fred Hutch Summer High School Internship Program, and Strong wanted her to feel the properties of the proteins they were studying.

The 3D printed models helped her feel the shape of various grooves and pockets and imagine the shape of other proteins that could bind by fitting into those spaces.

She is now an 18-year-old freshman at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and plans to major in chemistry with the eventual goal of becoming a cancer researcher and professor.

“3D printing lets us take the three-dimensional structures that structural biologists develop and scale them up to something that a human can hold and comprehend easier, which can allow for new insights,” Ross said. “It also helps make this highly visual science accessible to a greater number of researchers.”