Tissue engineering has produced innovative tools for cancer research. Advanced cancer models based on molecularly designed biomaterials aim to harness the dimensionality and biomechanical and biochemical properties of tumour tissues. However, to date, despite the critical role that the extracellular matrix plays in cancer, only a minority of cancer models are built on biomaterial-based matrices. Major reasons for avoiding this critical design feature are the difficulty in recreating the inherent complexity of the tumour microenvironment and the limited availability of practical analytical and validation techniques. Recent advances emerging at the interface of biomolecular science, supramolecular chemistry, materials science and tumour biology are generating new approaches to overcome these boundaries and enable the design of physiologically relevant cancer models. I will present how these biomaterial-based platforms are applied to deconstruct and engineer the tumour microenvironment of pancreatic cancer, opening opportunities to model primary tumours, metastasis and responses to anticancer treatment, to grow patient-derived organoids, and for multi-omics analysis.