Polymeric hydrogels as artificial extracellular microenvironments for cancer research

An emerging trend in cancer research is to design in vitro tissue culture models that can accurately guide clinical trials to improve their therapeutic outcomes. Particularly, recent studies in cancer research have focused on utilizing three-dimensional (3D) microenvironments to precisely mimic in vivo conditions as a new tool to gain mechanistic understanding that will lead to the discovery of novel target therapeutics. In order to create 3D tumor microenvironments in vitro, polymeric hydrogel materials have been widely used as an artificial microenvironment due to their tunable properties and structural similarity to native extracellular matrices. In this review, we discuss how polymeric hydrogels may serve as 3D artificial tumor microenvironments to study cancer. Furthermore, we review the most recent approaches to integrate hydrogel materials and micro/nano-fabrication techniques, such as microfluidic devices and 3D printing techniques, for cancer research.