Tissue Engineering for Drug Discovery and Personalized Medicine: Volume I

The overwhelming expense of drug development imposed great challenges to the pharmaceutical industry to explore novel technologies that enable cost reduction and to expedite the development process. Current attempts in the medical and pharmaceutical translational research are focused on complex human factors and conditions, rather than relying on animal models. While the simplicity of the traditional in vitro models makes them robust and suitable for thorough research, unfortunately provides only little biological relevance. The transdisciplinary integration of tissue engineering, cell biology and microsystem technologies, such as microfluidics and 3D bioprinting is paving the way towards devising innovative solutions by creating biomimetic physiological tissue structures as reliable in vitro models for drug screening in the pre-clinical stages.

This Research Topic intends to include the most relevant work in pharmaceutical applications of tissue engineering, from state-of-the-art contributions to critical reviews on the topic which will highlight the new advances in this field with an emphasis on the interface between the technological advancements and high impact applications, such as:

• 3D cell culture-based models;
• Organoid-based models;
• 3D bioprinting of living human tissue ;
• “Organ-on-a-chip”-based models;
• Pre-clinical testing of drugs in living cells/tissue/organs in vitro;
• Integration of in vitro and in silico data in physiologically based models.


We aim to address the potential of employing these powerful technologies in the drug discovery industry and what technical challenges need to be overcome? We welcome researchers working in this area, from academia and industries, to submit full-length research papers, short communication, and review articles to meet the goal of this collection.