3D Human Tumor Tissues Cultured in Dynamic Conditions as Alternative In Vitro Disease Models.

The slow knowledge progression about cancer disease and the high drug clinical failure are mainly due to the inadequacy of the simplistic pre-clinical in vitro and in vivo animal tumor models. To overpass these limits, in recent years many 3D matrix-based cell cultures have been proposed as challenging alternatives, since they allow to better recapitulate the in vitro cells-cells and cells-matrix reciprocal interactions in a more physiological context. Among many natural polymers, alginate has been adopted as an extracellular matrix surrogate to mimic the 3D spatial organization.

A multi-organ-on-chip to recapitulate the infiltration and the cytotoxic activity of circulating NK cells in 3D matrix-based tumor model.

The success of immunotherapeutic approaches strictly depends on the immune cells interaction with cancer cells. While conventional cell cultures under-represent the complexity and dynamic crosstalk of the tumor microenvironment, animal models do not allow deciphering the anti-tumor activity of the human immune system. Therefore, the development of reliable and predictive preclinical models has become crucial for the screening of immune-therapeutic approaches.