Advancing Human Cell Culture Towards More Physiological, Differentiated Tissues-Series II

Dear Colleagues,

Following the successful publication of the first Special Issue of “Advances in Human Cell Culture Techniques Towards more Physiological, Differentiated Tissues”, we are very pleased to launch the new edition, which is dedicated to highlighting the recent developments and related research in the field.

Advanced human cell culture systems and techniques, including induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), microfluidics, 3D cultures and organoids, co-culture systems, and multiorgan chips have garnered increasing interest in disease modeling, drug discovery, and toxicity testing. Such systems promise more human-relevant information and improved predictive value in comparison to cancer cell cultures or experiments using animals.

In the past few years, tremendous efforts have been put into designing and developing sophisticated human cell culture models to more accurately illustrate the natural microenvironment. These complex systems often take into account important parameters found in the host, such as tissue architecture and composition, shear stress, or cell motility and communication, as well as primary features of cells. The simultaneous consideration of multiple parameters within the advanced human cell cultures is facilitated by the development of novel high content screening techniques and single-cell analyses and is a rapidly emerging field of research often referred to as integrative biology.

Although these techniques are proving to be extremely useful tools in understanding human biology, they also hold the potential to lead to a massive reduction in whole animal experimentation or indeed the phasing out of animal experimentation entirely for extrapolation to human scenarios.

Within this Special Issue of Cells, we will highlight the challenges and future directions of advanced human cell culture models and techniques and we would highly appreciate the submission of original articles, reviews, commentaries, short reports, or protocols in this exciting field of research, not only in regard to optimization of such systems, but also respecting detailed characterization of pathogen- or tumor-related modifications and novel therapeutic opportunities tested in such systems. Cancerous cell lines are excluded from this Special Issue of Cells.

Prof. Dr. Doris Wilflingseder
Dr. Bettina Seeger
Dr. Anja Wilmes
Dr. Michael J. Ausserlechner
Dr. Wilfried Posch
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cells is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• human cell modeling
• stem cells
• gene expression analyses in 3D
• phenotypic analyses in 3D
• drug screening
• toxicity testing
• optimization of human cell models
• challenges of 3D models
• animal replacement
• infection biology