One of the goals of biology research is to simulate the native architecture of tissues, so that one can study cells in their "natural environments".
A step towards this goal is the development of organoid systems.
Organoid systems are the cultures of stem cells in a three-dimensional environment, i.e. a matrigel, which develop over time in the presence of requisite growth factors into tissue-like structures.
Self-organization into tissue-like structures, is a crowning achievement of invitro cell biology. What remains to be included is the vasculature, which can be incorporated by mixing the matrigel and microfluidics systems, with various technological approaches.
In the cancer context the stem cells, maybe replaced by cancer stem cells (patient derived/cell line derived) for primary tumors and circulating tumor cells for metastatic cancer.
The above system, may then be utilized for testing anti-cancer compounds, or even used to determine cancer related signatures in their native microenvironments. This information may inform the development of therapeutic cancer vaccines, which can be applied to patients with early diagnosis (depending on the stage), to prevent full blown development to metastastic cancer which is fatal.
Ref:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550983/
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