Sawyer is an aerospace engineer and an accomplished one at that. In the 1990s, he worked for NASA on the Mars Rover. He later landed at the University of Florida, where he earned his Ph.D., joined the faculty and ran a tribology lab, investigating the science of friction in everything from spacecraft to contact lenses.
But Sawyer's world was upended in 2013. He broke his leg during a soccer game in a "really non-competitive men's league," and found out he had Stage IV metastatic melanoma. "It was very, very bleak. I was told it was a one-Christmas diagnosis," he recalls.
Sawyer sought treatment at a cancer center in Texas, essentially living there for the next five months, but by the end of 2013 returned to Florida for an immunotherapy clinical trial at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa — an experience that saved his life.
It also shifted his perspective. Sawyer didn't want to work on space applications anymore. He wanted to help cure the disease that had almost killed him. "Cancer was the problem that I was going to solve with engineering tools," he explains.
At the time, his lab was doing 3D printing work, so he and his team started asking a simple but powerful question: Could they print cancer tumors to help researchers study them more effectively? By 2015, they'd narrowed in on a bigger idea — building a 3D platform that could support living human tissues for an extended period to serve as test beds for drugs and other cancer therapies. The question was how.
Their breakthrough came from an unexpected place: hand sanitizer. Strip away the perfumes, colors and fragrances, and what's left is a gel-like substance that behaves almost like a liquid solid, providing enough support to hold living cells in place. To complete the platform, they secured the microgel within "Darcy Plates," small wells that mimic a capillary bed, the network of blood vessels where tumors typically grow and spread. The microsystem works like a kidney dialysis machine, allowing fluid nutrients and drugs to flow in, and waste to flow out, while not disturbing the integrity of the tissue (or tumor) sample.
By 2020, the platform was turning heads. During the COVID-19 pandemic, UF researchers used the system to study the virus's impact on lung tissue. The inventions led to the creation of spin-out company Aurita Bioscience, a Gainesville-based startup Sawyer founded. Sawyer's work also caught the attention of Moffitt leaders, who in 2023 recruited him to lead Moffitt's new department of bioengineering.
Today, Sawyer runs a state-of-the-art laboratory on Moffitt's campus that's using microscopic 3D models to tackle a range of difficult-to-treat cancers, including ovarian cancer, and ultimately speed the pace of drug discovery.
Developing a new drug often tops $2 billion and takes an average of 10 to 13 years. Meanwhile, more than 20,000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, and 12,000 to 15,000 die from the disease. Because the disease metastasizes rapidly and is often diagnosed at a late stage, the five-year survival rate is only about 50%.
Seeking to improve those outcomes, Sawyer and his colleagues at Moffitt are depositing tumor samples removed from patients during surgeries or biopsies into their Darcy Plate system. The goal is to better understand how therapies work by studying the cancer outside the body and to eventually use the platform as a "test track," where they can determine the best treatment regimen for individual patients.
It's also worth noting that plenty of new cancer treatments are on the horizon, and many will be developed right here in Florida at places like Moffitt.
Immunotherapy — a Moffitt specialty that saved Sawyer's life — holds promise for treating many types of cancer. It works by activating the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells. Moffitt officials also are bullish on radiopharmaceuticals, a class of drugs that deliver radiation to cancer cells at the molecular level, much like heat-seeking missiles. One such drug, Pluvicto, is already being used to treat advanced prostate cancer, and others are under development to treat types of brain cancer and lung cancer. A key advantage of these therapies is their precision: because they target cancer more directly than traditional chemotherapy or radiation, they tend to be less toxic.
With his test track and tenacity, I have no doubt that Sawyer will help accelerate the pace of innovation.
Thirteen years after his "one-Christmas" diagnosis and career pivot, he isn't stepping off the gas — and nothing, he says, is off limits. "My goal is all cancer. ... When anybody says, 'This is an unculturable cancer,' a cancer that we can't study outside of the patient, those are the ones that we put on the board," he recently told FLORIDA TREND's editorial team.
"We're taking ideas today, and we're sketching them out. We're making them actionable targets. We're building teams to go after them, and we're basically going into the problem saying, we're going to get it," says Sawyer. "We're not going to quit."