Drug discovery is a very time consuming and expensive process, and it is getting more and more expensive as the safety and efficacy bar are being raised higher. Normally, a new drug developed from its initial drug candidate screening phase to final FDA approval takes about 7 -10 years and has a huge failure rate at each of the development phases. This would not entirely be a surprise if we knew that all the initial drug in vitro screening were based on 2D monolayer cell culture.

Nowadays, it is well known that results from 2D monolayer cell culture have a very poor correlation with both in vivo animal and in vivo human clinical data. Therefore, starting from an in vitro model that correlates well with in vivo animal model and human patient is critical in reducing drug development cost and time to market. Although 3D cell culture has been recognized as a better in vitro model for drug screening and toxicity studies (please also refer to references in Technical Resources) there has been no real transition from 2D to 3D cell culture, simply because prior to 3D Biotek's novel 3D Scaffolds there were no satisfactory and easy-to-use 3D cell culture devices available on the market.