Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724, USA.
Graduate Program in Genetics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA.
Exp Biol Med (Maywood). 2022 Dec;247(24):2176-2183. doi: 10.1177/15353702221131877. Epub 2022 Nov 19.
While mouse models and two-dimensional (2D) cell culture systems have dominated as research tools for cancer biology, three-dimensional (3D) cultures have gained traction as a new approach that retains features of biology within an system. Over time, 3D culture systems have evolved from spheroids and tumorspheres to organoids, and by doing so, they have become more complex and representative of original tissue. Such technological improvements have mostly benefited the study of heterogeneous solid tumors, like those found in breast cancer (BC), by providing an attractive avenue for scalable drug testing and biobank generation. Experimentally, organoids have been used in the BC field to dissect mechanisms related to cellular invasion and metastasis-and through co-culture methods-epithelial interactions with stromal and immune cells. In addition, organoid studies of wild-type mouse models and healthy donor samples have provided insight into the basic developmental cellular and molecular biology of the mammary gland, which may inform one's understanding of the initial stages of cancer development and progression.
虽然小鼠模型和二维（2D）细胞培养系统一直是癌症生物学研究的主要工具，但三维（3D）培养系统作为一种新方法逐渐受到关注，这种方法在系统内保留了生物学的特征。随着时间的推移，3D 培养系统已经从球体和肿瘤球体发展到类器官，并且通过这样做，它们变得更加复杂，更能代表原始组织。这些技术改进主要使研究异质性实体瘤受益，例如乳腺癌（BC），为可扩展的药物测试和生物库生成提供了有吸引力的途径。在实验中，类器官已被用于 BC 领域，以剖析与细胞侵袭和转移相关的机制，并通过共培养方法研究上皮细胞与基质和免疫细胞的相互作用。此外，对野生型小鼠模型和健康供体样本的类器官研究为乳腺的基本发育细胞和分子生物学提供了深入了解，这可能有助于人们理解癌症发展和进展的初始阶段。
