Around 18 months back, the pandemic caught us off guard and people across the globe suffered. What is termed as an incredible feat, we had the vaccines available for the public within a year. But have you wondered why it took such a long time to develop and approve a specific drug against COVID -19? Even in case of other deadly diseases like cancer, which claims countless lives every year, the failure rate of drugs in clinical trials is 97%. That means 97 percent of the time that a new drug is tested in a clinical trial for a particular type of cancer, it never makes it to the market. 
In this feature, we learn why this is the case. Drug discovery against a specific disease starts with screening thousands of molecules to choose possible drug candidates which are tested on animals before moving to the clinical trials. As animals are not a sustainable model to screen drugs, the alternative is to screen and test these drugs on cells grown as single sheets on surfaces in labs (2D culture). The major drawback of these systems is that they do not represent the complexity, structure and functioning of actual human tissues or organs. This makes them unreliable and unpredictable which ultimately leads to high failure rate in clinical trials.
Modern medicine, thus requires new efficient tools to battle the menace of diseases. This makes 3D cell cultures very important as they represent an in-vitro system with in-vivo characteristics, that means it carries advantages offered by both 2D systems and animal models. They offer a sustainable platform for a range of applications in biomedical research like drug based investigations and tumor research. Developments and innovations in 3D cell cultures will soon promote it as a mainstream tool in research. This would highly benefit the society to tackle the severity of deadly diseases.

​3D cell culture is an innovative technique to accurately model human tissues with massive potential in biomedical applications. Its unique ‘near to in-vivo’ characteristics makes it an attractive tool in fields such as drug development and testing, tissue engineering and cancer research to name a few.
Have you wondered how are cells cultured in three dimensions in a lab? Well, based on the application, there are broadly two types of 3D cell cultures depending on the use of scaffolds. Scaffolds are supporting elements that promote growth of cells in a well defined shape and structure to match the tissue of interest.
Scaffold free 3D culture -  This is a simplistic way of culturing cells in 3D where the cells are grown without using a scaffold and allowed to interact with each other and self-arrange to form clusters called spheroids. These spheroids recapitulate physiological characteristics of tissues with regard to cell-cell contact. In one such study at NRG, we developed lung cancer spheroids to evaluate a novel drug delivery method and showed that spheroids can be a suitable model for drug based investigations. 
Scaffold based 3D cell culture - This type of 3D cell culture is developed by providing scaffolds to cells for physical support on which they can attach and grow in a specific shape. The scaffolds can be of synthetic or natural origin and the choice of selection is dependent on the application. For instance, recognizing the limited treatment options in severe burn victims, we have developed an inexpensive, biocompatible and biodegradable scaffold to promote wound healing.
3D cultures are now being integrated with microfluidic chambers to construct in vitro organ-on-a-chip to model several diseases. With such disruptive innovations we will be better equipped to tackle the increasing global disease burden. 3D cell cultures, thus, have an enormous potential to have a positive impact on global health.

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