The increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases, namely cancer, Alzheimer’s (AD) and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), worldwide continues to be a major health burden. Research attempts have been made to understand the pathophysiology and develop effective therapeutic agents for these diseases using conventional in vitro and ex vivo models. Due to the complexity of human disease mechanisms, often these models fail to recapitulate clinically relevant pathologies. As such, interests are arising in the exploration of three-dimensional (3D) in-vitro models, which create an artificial environment to closely mimic in vivo human conditions. Several studies have developed 3D models for cancer, AD and CVD research which can greatly improve the understanding of biological mechanisms and mirror clinical drug activities. Thus, 3D cultures may provide new in-vitro models that recapitulate the architecture and biological mechanisms of human diseases prior to the need for the use of sentient animals.

在世界范围内，非传染性疾病（即癌症，阿尔茨海默氏病（AD）和心血管疾病（CVD））的流行率不断上升，仍然是主要的健康负担。已经进行了研究尝试以使用常规的体外和离体模型来理解这些疾病的病理生理学并开发有效的治疗剂。由于人类疾病机制的复杂性，通常这些模型无法概括临床相关病理。因此，人们对探索三维（3D）体外模型产生了兴趣，这些模型创建了一个可以紧密模仿体内的人工环境人的条件。几项研究已经开发出用于癌症，AD和CVD研究的3D模型，可以极大地增进对生物学机制的了解并反映临床药物活性。因此，在需要使用有情动物之前，3D培养可以提供新的体外模型，概述人类疾病的结构和生物学机制。