Two scientists at different stages of their careers are driving environmentally friendly changes in their labs and inspiring others to make changes toward sustainability. For both Ru-ching Hsia, Ph.D., principal scientist in the Electron Microscopy Core (EMC), and Thomas Abney-Lidahl, postbaccalaureate fellow in the HIV Dynamics and Replication Program, “green” practices are a top priority and personal mission guided by their experience and witnessing the benefits at other institutions.

Bioengineers at NCI Frederick and Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, with external collaborators, have devised new types of 3D miniature tissues that assemble themselves and better reflect the composition of tumors in the body compared to existing models. The team aimed to complement organoids, a class of expensive, human-like models. Their creation, dubbed “MatriSpheres,” offers an inexpensive, middle-ground platform but, unexpectedly, also includes features that are unique from organoids.

It’s three minutes before the keynote at the 2025 Spring Research Festival, and the seats are filling up. Chatter thrums through the room. Somewhere within the stir, someone is talking about tumors. A voice at the back keeps mentioning malaria. Like the whirl of hushed conversations, the burgeoning audience is an amalgam.

After hours at the microscope, Sebastian Temme, Ph.D., was at a loss. The bacterial structures he’d been examining weren’t arranged the way he expected they’d be. He and his colleagues initially feared they’d done the experiment wrong, but they soon realized they’d latched onto something fascinating.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a scientist studying ways to combat a rare form of cancer that overwhelmingly manifests in a specific group of people. You suspect a series of genetic mutations. Testing for the presence of those alterations one at a time would involve a prohibitive amount of time and money. What you need is a database of thousands of cancer cases, characterized for genetic data, to which you could compare your cases. Enter NCI’s Genomic Data Commons.