The pancreas is a relatively small organ, but it has structural and functional complexity that makes it difficult to understand underlying disease mechanisms and determine effective treatments. Thus, there is a great need for more effective tools to study pancreatic disease, and breakthroughs in various fields have contributed to development of in vitro tissue models to understand the pathophysiological conditions of pancreatic disease. Here, we provide an overview of three major parts of the strategies in pancreatic tissue modeling. The advent of stem cell technology enables large-scale production of cells, which can represent individual patients’ information. The biomaterials provide cells with a three-dimensional (3D) geometry to mimic the nature of cell—matrix contacts. With the benefits of 3D culture systems, decellularized extracellular matrix materials have been introduced as a promising tool for providing tissue-specific niches to cells. In addition, several biofabrication strategies allow modeling of structural complexities including cell deposition and neighboring environment, as compared to standard embedding cells in matrix. Integration of these strategies can overcome the current challenges to each approach and guide the path towards the next generation of 3D pancreatic tissue modeling for translational medicine.

中文翻译：

---

体外3D胰腺组织建模的研究进展与展望

胰腺是一个相对较小的器官，但是它具有结构和功能上的复杂性，因此很难理解潜在的疾病机制和确定有效的治疗方法。因此，迫切需要更有效的工具来研究胰腺疾病，并且各个领域的突破都促进了体外研究的发展。组织模型了解胰腺疾病的病理生理状况。在这里，我们提供了胰腺组织建模策略的三个主要部分的概述。干细胞技术的出现使得能够大规模生产细胞，这可以代表每个患者的信息。生物材料为细胞提供三维（3D）几何形状，以模仿细胞-基质接触的性质。借助3D培养系统的优势，已引入脱细胞的细胞外基质材料，作为为细胞提供组织特异性壁ni的有前途的工具。此外，与标准嵌入单元格在基质中相比，几种生物制造策略允许对结构复杂度进行建模，包括细胞沉积和邻近环境。