Development of Cell Spheroids by Advanced Technologies

Abstract 3D cell culture has been strongly advocated as a highly useful culture technique instead of the traditional 2D cell culture. Specially, spheroids, as the primary mode of 3D cell culture, allow cells to establish a connection between the cell and the extracellular matrix to form a specific 3D structure that better mimics the growing environment of cells in vivo. Benefiting from the emergence of various advanced micromachining platforms, spheroids have received increasing attention in diverse fields. Herein, the combination of the cell spheroid culture with microfluidic technology is reviewed. After concisely introducing the traditional methods for fabricating cell spheroids, an outline of the approaches for preparing cell spheroids using different advanced techniques is given. Then, the various applications of the generated cell spheroids in the field of biomedical engineering are presented and the current limitations, challenges, and future directions are summarized.