Three-dimensional (3D) cell culture models became an important technique in oncology research. These novel 3D techniques permit the investigation of the tumor microenvironment, promising clinical assays to predict patient response and enhanced drug selection for clinical trials. Although early diagnosis and development of new treatment strategies led to improved prognosis, the burden for the pa...

Because three-dimensional (3D) in vitro models are more accurate than 2D cell culture models and faster and cheaper than animal models, they have become a prospective trend in the biomedical and pharmaceutical fields, especially for personalized and targeted therapies. Because appropriate 3D models can be customized to mimic the in vivo microenvironment wherein various cell populations grow wit...

Animal and two-dimensional cell culture models have had a profound impact on not only lung research but also medical research at large, despite inherent flaws and differences when compared with in vivo and clinical observations. Three-dimensional (3D) tissue models are a natural progression and extension of existing techniques that seek to plug the gaps and mitigate the drawbacks of two-dimensi...

It is well known that angiogenesis is an essential biological event. To understand fully how the blood vessel grows and functions in the angiogenic process, we should consider the construction of in vivo-like environment, such as threedimensional (3D) extracellular matrix (ECM). However, most of in vitro studies of the angiogenesis have been relied on two-dimensional (2D) culture or 3D Matrigel...

Solid tumours naturally grow in 3D wherein the spatial arrangement of cells affects how they interact with each other. This suggests that 3D cell culture may mimic the natural in vivo setting better than traditional monolayer (2D) cell culture, where cells are grown attached to plastic. Here, using HER2-positive breast cancer cell lines as models (BT474, HCC1954, EFM192A), the effects of cultur...

The utilization of 3D, physiologically relevant in vitro cancer models to investigate complex interactions between tumor and stroma has been increasing. Prior work has generally focused on the cancer cells and, the role of fibroblast culture conditions on tumor-stromal cell interactions is still largely unknown. Here, we focus on the stroma by comparing functional behaviors of human mammary fib...

While it is increasingly recognized that three-dimensional (3D) cell culture models recapitulate drug responses of human cancers with more fidelity than monolayer cultures, a lack of quantitative analysis methods limit their implementation for reliable and routine assessment of emerging therapies. Here, we introduce an approach based on computational analysis of fluorescence image data to provi...

There has been much recent interest in working with cells cultured in three-dimensional (3D) matrices to better model the properties of the extracellular matrix environment found in vivo. However, working within 3D matrices adds several difficulties to experiments that have become routine in two-dimensional (2D) culture systems. Biochemical approaches are made difficult by the presence of milli...

In this review, we discuss the microenvironmental cues that modulate the status of cells to yield physiologically more relevant three-dimensional (3D) cell-based high throughput drug screening (HTS) platforms for drug discovery. Evidence is provided to support the view that simplifying 3D cell culture platforms for HTS applications calls for identifying and validating ubiquitous three-dimension...