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(Ed.)
The burden of cancer continues to increase in
society and negatively impacts the lives of numerous patients.
Due to the high cost of current treatment strategies, there is a
crucial unmet need to develop inexpensive preclinical platforms
to accelerate the process of anti-cancer drug discovery
to improve outcomes in cancer patients, most especially in
female patients. Many current methods employ expensive
animal models which not only present ethical concerns but
also do not often accurately predict human physiology and
the outcomes of anti-cancer drug responsiveness. Conventional
treatment approaches for cancer generally include
systemic therapy after a surgical procedure. Although this
treatment technique is effective, the outcome is not always
positive due to various complex factors such as intratumor
heterogeneity and confounding factors within the tumor
microenvironment (TME). Patients who develop metastatic
disease still have poor prognosis. To that end, recent efforts
have attempted to use 3D microengineered platforms to
enhance the predictive power and efficacy of anti-cancer drug
screening, ultimately to develop personalized therapies.
Fascinating features of microengineered assays, such as
microfluidics, have led to the advancement in the development
of the tumor-on-chip technology platforms, which have
shown tremendous potential for meaningful and physiologically
relevant anti-cancer drug discovery and screening.
Three dimensional microscale models provide unprecedented
ability to unveil the biological complexities of cancer and
shed light into the mechanism of anti-cancer drug resistance
in a timely and resource efficient manner. In this review, we
discuss recent advances in the development of microengineered
tumor models for anti-cancer drug discovery and
screening in female-related cancers. We specifically focus on
female-related cancers to draw attention to the various
approaches being taken to improve the survival rate of
women diagnosed with cancers caused by sex disparities. We
also briefly discuss other cancer types like colon adenocarcinomas
and glioblastoma due to their high rate of occurrence
in females, as well as the high likelihood of sex-biased
mutations which complicate current treatment strategies for
women. We highlight recent advances in the development of
3D microscale platforms including 3D tumor spheroids,
microfluidic platforms as well as bioprinted models, and
discuss how they have been utilized to address major
challenges in the process of drug discovery, such as chemoresistance,
intratumor heterogeneity, drug toxicity, etc. We also
present the potential of these platform technologies for use in
high-throughput drug screening approaches as a replacements
of conventional assays. Within each section, we will
provide our perspectives on advantages of the discussed
platform technologies.
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