New Johns Hopkins center aims to unlock genetic mysteries of breast cancer

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The images were striking—cells clustering into patterns that, to biomedical engineer Joel Bader, looked like starfish and fruits and inkblots.

It was a Johns Hopkins colleague, cell biologist Andrew Ewald, who shared these models with Bader several years ago. The images revealed variations in the patterns of breast tissue grown in Ewald's lab—3-D cultures, or "organoids," derived from the cells of actual cancer patients.