3D Cell Cultures: Challenges and Perspectives

Dear Colleagues,

Three-dimensional (3D) culture systems have gained increasing interest in toxicity testing, drug discovery, stem cells, disease modeling, and emerging technologies. Such systems provide more physiologically-relevant information and predictive data in comparison to 2D monolayer cultures or experiments using animals. Since, in vivo, most cells are surrounded by other cells and ECM in a 3D architecture, 2D cell culture tests are often misleading and do not anticipate responses in vivo. Additionally, animal experiments often do not reflect the situation in vivo due to species differences.

Therefore, in the past few years, tremendous efforts have been made in designing and developing sophisticated 3D cell culture models to more-accurately illustrate the natural microenvironment where cells reside in tissues. Cells in 3D culture differ regarding their morphology, physiology and cellular responses compared to cells grown in 2D. They were demonstrated to be more similar to the in vivo behavior upon treatment, offering a wide range of possible applications. Adoption of 3D cell culture systems in, e.g., infection and cancer cell biology, stem cell studies, tissue engineering for implantation, or drug testing are currently on-going. In addition to being excellent human in vitro models allowing more relevant analyses, 3D cell culture models can also—in the future—contribute to massive reduction or phasing out of animal experimentation.

Within this Special Issue of Cells we want to discuss the challenges and future directions of 3D cell culture models, and we welcome contributions in this wide field of research.

Assoc. Prof. Doris Wilflingseder
Guest Editor

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• 3D modeling
• infection models
• disease models
• stem cells
• gene expression analyses in 3D
• phenotypic analyses in 3D
• drug screening
• toxicity testing
• optimization of 3D models
• benefits of 3D models
• challenges of 3D models