Recreating complex pathophysiologies in vitro with extracellular matrix surrogates for anticancer therapeutics screening

In vitro tumour models utilise various cancer cells and an appropriate extracellular matrix equivalent to recapitulate the in vivo tumour microenvironment. Three-dimensional tissue surrogates (e.g., decellularised tissue grafts, decellularised monolayers, hydrogels, electrospun fibres and sponges) are increasingly used as alternatives to conventional two-dimensional monolayer cultures to model the tissue environment more faithfully for drug development and screening. Herein, we critically assess the advances and shortfalls of these three-dimensional systems as in vitro models of cancer.