Tumour targeting: Nanoantennas heat up.

manipulations can be conducted at any desired time during an experiment. This novel approach to hydrogel design should be particularly appealing for fields such as developmental biology, stem-cell biology or tumour-cell biology, in which the role of the microenvironment in controlling cell function is particularly important and is still relatively poorly understood. With these novel ECM models at hand, researchers could, for example, study how stem cells renew themselves or specialize in response to local changes in the availability of signalling cues or in their spatial organization, providing knowledge that will be crucial to help move stem-cell biology closer to the clinic. Thus, the benefits of this technology in basic biological studies are already clearly apparent, but it would not be surprising if in the not-toodistant future tissue-mimetic ‘constructs’, fabricated with the help of light-controlled three-dimensional gel patterning, could be successfully used for pharmaceutical high-throughput screening. ❐