Tumor mimetic platform for clinically relevant novel drug screening

Pharmaceutical companies spend ~$2.6 B and time of 10-15 years on the research and development of a new drug candidate (Avorn, 2015). Unfortunately, less than 10% of these candidates are approved by FDA (Wong et al., 2019), due to the weaknesses of preclinical drug evaluation methods based on conventional monolayer cell cultures and different animal models, which do not adequately imitate the complexity of human diseases such as cancer. Therefore, pharmaceutical companies are looking for reliable, relevant, reproducible and inexpensive preclinical models capable to faithfully replicate in vivo microenvironment so to improve the drug development process. Tissue engineering principles are recognized as a promising strategy to create an artificial in vivo-like environment based on biomaterials as cell carriers that imitate native extracellular matrices (ECMs) and biomimetic bioreactors providing physiologically-relevant conditions. The aim of this work was to create and validate a novel, simple, relevant, and robust 3D platform for anticancer drug screening, based on alginate hydrogels as cell carriers and a biomimetic perfusion bioreactor that imitates the environment of highly vascularized tissues.