Advanced 3D In Vitro Models to Recapitulate the Breast Tumor Microenvironment

Breast cancer research still relies on 2D in vitro and animal models, although they cannot recapitulate the high complexity of human tumors. 3D in vitro models could assist the scientific community by providing platforms that recapitulate the main properties of human tumors for helping to understand the breast tumor microenvironment and discover new biomarkers and therapeutics. This chapter highlights the most relevant studies performed in the last years regarding 3D in vitro breast cancer modeling, covering the scaffold-based models recapitulating the breast tumor microenvironments, the main biomaterials used for recapitulating the tumor extracellular matrix, as well as the engineering approaches to mimic the tumor.